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Monday, Jan 25, 2010
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A free and welcoming literature festival

Vaiju Naravane

Photo: Rohit Jain Paras

A section of the crowd at the Jaipur Literature Festival.

JAIPUR: As the fifth edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival comes to a triumphant close it is time to take stock, to look at what worked, what didn’t and why.

To say that the festival was a runaway success, a celebration that nourished the mind, body and soul would be to state the obvious. An estimated 30,000 persons overran the grounds of the Diggi Palace Hotel. The Baithak, the Mughal Tent, the Durbar Hall or the Front Lawn where the events were held were invariably so crammed that people sat on the floor in aisles, crowded around external television screens and patiently stood for hours because of the paucity of seats. The Festival has grown so exponentially, starting out with 17 authors and today hosting 220 of them, that the Diggi Palace is literally bursting at the seams.

“If the heart is large enough there is always room for more. The food preparation is personally overseen here by members of the family, some of whom still observe purdah and we have maintained the Rajasthani tradition of hospitality. The order could be for 500 but we have served as many as 800 people at no extra charge. As I said, the heart has to be big enough. It is a lot of work but also a labour of love,” Jyotika Kumari who runs the hotel from what essentially is the family home told The Hindu. Her’s is the invisible hand behind the impeccable organisation of meals, and delicious kulhad-wali chai that is so generously doled out to all comers and her gracious presence, in colourful traditional costume is everywhere, smiling, advising and helping.

This year too the Festival hosted several big names including Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, Vikram Chandra, Roddy Doyle, Louis De Bernieres, Esther Freud, Girish Karnad, Chetan Bhagat, Nayantara Sahgal, Roberto Calasso, Devdutt Patnaik, Claire Tomlin, Michael Frayn, Gulzar, Shabani Azmi, Javed Akhtar, Meghnad Desai, Pavan Varma, Mark Tully, Her Majesty Ashi Dorjo Wangmo Wangchuk of Bhutan, to name just a few.

A move to be lauded was the inclusion of several sessions with Dalit writers including Ajay Navaria, O.P Valmiki, Sivakami and Lakshman Gaekwad, many of whom read out poetry or prose passages of extraordinary power. The French presence was sponsored by the Bonjour India festival organised by the French Culture Ministry and included writers like Christophe Jaffrelot, Catherine Clement or Atiq Rahimi who is of Afghan origin, but the discussions, with the exception of Catherine Clement who talked about Nehru and Edwina, were disappointing.

The absolute show stopper, the author who almost had the audience in tears, as much by his humanism, the breadth and depth of his intelligence and understanding as by the power of his reading and oratory was Wole Soyinka. The session was beautifully moderated by Jasbir Jain, an academic and critic in residence at the University of Rajasthan. She knew his work, yet refrained from showing off, nudging him in the right direction to elicit responses that were illuminating and, from a literary point of view, most satisfying, in that they had both form and substance.

The same cannot be said of other sessions which were unrewarding and frustrating in the extreme because the moderators had failed to do their work. Writer Hanif Kureishi sat through an agonising session with debutante novelists Tishani Doshi and Tania James looking like a bear with a sore head, dishing out one-liners and monosyllabic answers that were funny but bordered on the rude. A session featuring Devdutt Patnaik and Roberto Calasso was so badly moderated it was a mess. A second session, organised as a conversation between the two writers, was rich in nuance, subtlety, information and interpretation.

Another tendency has been to have the same moderator conduct several discussions and if he or she is not good at the job several events go down the pan. .

The sheer volume of writers has meant that three or four speakers are often crammed into hour-long sessions, making the discussions superficial and incomplete. In contrast the one-to-one conversations with writers, especially when they are questioned by competent moderators are a joy to attend. Producer Sanjoy Roy, a competent moderator himself, said it was difficult to decide when Hindi works being read should be translated for the largely English speaking audiences especially since Hindi speakers receive no such favours. The Dalit literature session left no time for discussions because poems were being re-read in translation.

Amongst some of the better debates were those on politics, society and issues examined by non-fiction writers. Asma Jehangir, Ali Sethi, Romesh Gunashekhara, Shyam Saran and Shazia Omar, a Bangladeshi novelist discussed the question of hostile neighbourhoods in an exchange that occasionally verged on the confrontational.

But the essential beauty and joy of the Jaipur Literature Festival is not that it is Asia’s largest or most prestigious or even that it offers music, art, workshops in addition to literary debates and discussions. Jaipur’s uniqueness lies in the fact that besides its evident quality, it is free, welcoming, inclusive and egalitarian in a country that thrives on differences and hierarchies.

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