Jaipur LitFest as Spectacle

The recently concluded Jaipur Literary festival showed India honours writers, literary producers if you wish, the only way it can: By turning them into “players” in a Spectacle. If it can organise the Indian Premier League (IPL) and variations thereof with all its accompanying signs of entertainment, so can it literary production with its own iconography.

In the Indian Premier League, cricket has been turned truly into a gladiatorial sport of Roman times. Played out under the canopy of night sky, with players drenched in the shadow-free yellow of floodlights, the audience soaks in the ‘magical' grandiloquence of the Spectacle's signs: cheerleaders, heart-stopping music and of course “sports chatter”, in Umberto Eco's memorable phrase, as equally important constitutive elements of the Spectacle as the game itself.

A new map for litfests

At Jaipur, the State government and policymakers in New Delhi ‘created' an iconography that was peculiarly Indian, unlike the IPL that has borrowed wholeheartedly from American sports ‘Spectacle'”.

The whole controversy over Salman Rushdie's participation, in retrospect, reads like a parody of a Kafkaesque moment: a threat to life that the celebrated author later suspected not to exist, and yet he respected it enough not to defy; the readings by four writers of passages from the banned novel; their hurried exit from the site on being informed of the danger to their lives, an episode that parodied the Gulag and “dissident-writer” precariousness. And finally, back to Kafka, as officials (and some troublemakers) refuse Mr Rushdie even a “virtual” presence. Two new signs were, therefore, added to the iconography of the hugely “successful” carnival.

One was the fear of “fundamentalist” or what has been identified with it, a Muslim backlash (it was never clear who had threatened Mr Rushdie or why considering he had attended the JLF in 2007, posing for photographs on Juhu Beach in Mumbai) that rekindled his fame. Two, by denying the most worthy Indo-Anglian literary producer in modern times his “freedom of expression”, it also ignited global attention and turned the event into a Spectacle worth viewing.

Both, the fear of attack by Muslims on Mr Rushdie and the media-perceived onslaught on the writer's fundamental freedom were not grounded in reality, but in public relations of sorts.

The Famed One was never denied a visa and it's highly unlikely that the Indian State will hunt him down should he write about the dismal record of the Indian government in upholding writers' freedoms. All that the Rajasthan government would have needed to do had he done so to do is to simply point to the JLF as vivid testimony to the freedom allowed to writers to “express” themselves.

And express themselves they did, even if few listened even to those who deserved attention and the privilege of critical appreciation. One print media person noticed that Tom Stoppard's discussion on his art drew a thinner crowd than Oprah Winfrey, and that it was restless.

Writing for writers

Writers couldn't have cared less, for they came to meet other writers and, needless to say, important publishers and perhaps to just soak in the headiness of the country's best watering hole for high culture (the other being Goa). One debut writer gushed he had come to meet his “heroes.' He didn't mean those who bought his literary outpourings, but established members of that fraternity to which he had gained membership.

The combination of the Wonder Boy of cheesecake Indian fiction writing and global writers of no small repute, despite the Kafkaesque parodies or perhaps because of them, lent the JLF a quivering intensity of expectations.

At the JLF, writers were transported from the solitary pursuit of inspiration, under the floodlights of instant and glamorous nobility.

Perhaps many visitors left the carnival site with hopes of returning as a writer, but the uniqueness of the Spectacle was not to inspire in them the noble pursuit of the right word (or the nobler one of reading) so much as to carry away, however briefly, the scent of glamour in a profession once thought “unprofitable”.

The JLF was a celebration of writing, not reading; it was an exaltation of writers in a way that only India, the specialist in Spectacles and the art of turning the serious into the trivial, can achieve.

India's unique fests

Yet, the JLF was no ordinary Spectacle, with the obvious signs of one like the IPL. In the latter, players are like gladiators in the way American baseball players are; they draw sustenance from the arena in which their claims to fame find justification.

In the case of the literary festival at Jaipur, writers do not “play” for an audience, as they would at the Edinburgh Art festival or in street readings; here they ‘play' for themselves.

So the JLF simply reasserts or confirms at the very least, the exalted position of the writer: Jaipur represents a journey from exalted solitude of writing to the no less exalted experience of self-affirmation. If the IPL uncovers the cricketer's persona, the JLF simply confirms the writers'.

But in one crucial sense the JLF is similar to the IPL as Spectacle. Both engage audience attention in the image of the “player” rather than the “sport” or its sublime and sometimes, ineffable qualities.

At JLF it is the writer at work, discussing, empanelled, televised, all of which add up to Gestures that substitute for his art or its inspiration (at least for the audience whose numbers count for the festival's huge success).

The writer is on display just as the cricketer on the pitch bathed in floodlights is.

The JLF's official website underlines its success “The Greatest Literary Show on Earth.” It had everything a writers' carnival needs: good food, good conversation, great writers. But where are The Readers?

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