Jaipur lit fest, notes from day two

Notes from the Jaipur Lit Fest, Day Two

Khullar chai
At Flow, the fancy café in between the Baithak and the Mughal Tent, you get hot apple cider honey, green tea and acceptable freshly brewed coffee for a price. Authors and delegates get a decent facsimile of dhaba chai in the Diggi Palace dining room, and students lay siege to the tea and coffee machines near the book stalls. But the one we’re all waiting for is the khullar chai, served in tiny cups. Like the Bisleri water, it’s a junta freebie; I remember buying my own water and tea at Edinburgh.

Crossing the bar
Given that most authors have no limits when handed one of two things—an open mike and a full bottle—it may have been a mistake to offer free booze to authors and speakers. A dashing young author known for his taste in fine hats, women and wine reaches the bar first, aided by some nifty elbow work, asks for five beers, as an aperitif. He’s told his card entitles him to one drink at a time. By the end of the evening, though, the bar has crumbled, and I see the Authors XI (a mixed Delhi-Bombay team) emerge with most of its contents. For non-drinkers, we recommend the hot apple cider at Flow.

Conspiracy theories
The morning session on The Conspiracy has Tunku Varadarajan, Lawrence Wright and Kai Bird. Tunku, it is decided, is the official festival patch: he’s employed in any session that has sprung an obvious leak. I miss The Conspiracy, but am informed it was a Right-Wing, not a Left-Wing one. Over at Open magazine, Rahul Bhatia has the lowdown.

"No place for us"
Diggi Palace is filling up, with Wole Soyinka, the Queen of Bhutan and Tina Brown joining in along with Girish Karnad, Christopher Jaffrelot and company; but sometimes they’re not the biggest draws. The Dalit literature panel is packed to the seams, as O P Valmiki asks whether literature can be for Dalits as well. It’s a question that had to be asked about three decades ago, and the sad part is that Valmiki has to ask it again.
“When we are told not to be victims, who gave us that role? Caste never leaves us alone; it’s so deep-rooted that it lives on in our minds.” S Anand, who’s moderating the session, mentions that he passed a Vaishnava Bhojanalaya earlier in the day, and that he, along with most of us, wouldn’t be able to imagine a Chamar Bhojanalaya. There’s a rush at the end of the session as a score of foreign journalists head towards the Dalit woman writer, Sivakami, for soundbytes. But for me, what resonates is the way Kancha Ilaiah, O P Valmiki and Sivakami make a point of thanking the fest for inviting Dalit writers to join in “so early” in their history. Valmiki mentions that most regional language festivals don’t have space for Dalit writers. It’s not a literary category that counts.

Wole on The Road
On the front lawns, Wole Soyinka takes stage after Her Royal Highness of Bhutan. And for an hour, his voice, deep, sonorous, richly musical, fills the space as he reads from The Road. There’s a gigantic carved wooden door behind him, parrots darting out in formation in the branches overhead, and the bright circus-tent ribbons of the open-air pavilion. Sometimes you have to have the right backdrop.

Two Wole moments, since I can’t reproduce his poetry:

On the need for forgiveness post-apartheid:
“I believe what lends dignity to humans is an acceptance of responsibility. Forgiveness, yes, but also restitution. Not vengeance, not exaction, but restitution.”

And on the gods:
“The gods never really die. They just expand their portfolios.”

On boldly going and the Kindle
The Internet panel—“Can the Internet save books?”—moderated by Barkha Dutt, and including Vikram Chandra, Gulzar, Tina Brown & Prasoon Joshi wanders into the usual maze (e-books versus “real” books, the Death of Reading As We Know It). And rouses a massed horde of bloggers and Internet fiends who’re snoozing at the tables at the back, briefly, when someone says “You can’t take a Kindle into the loo,” referring to the portability of paper books versus the Kindle. Our table wakes up in violent fashion. The chorus of “You can!”s is topped by the one voice saying, “I did!”

Also packed: the Katha Kram: Readings From Rajasthan session, and the Tibet debate, with Isabel Hilton and Tenzin Tsundue—introduced by Dalrymple as “the most-arrested author of the festival”. More on that later; the khullar chai calls.

Notes from the Jaipur Lit Fest, day one

The Jaipur Shuffle

The Jaipur Shuffle is a well-known manouevre executed in obeisance to the local gods of fog and missed flights, and it was done with expertise on the first day of the fest. Wole Soyinka—“Mr Woyinka”, says a distracted organizer, and the contraction shows every signs of catching on--Girish Karnad, Jamaica Kincaid and Andrew O’Hagan are among the authors felled by the elements, though Karnad and Mr Woyinka are rumoured to be likely to join us tomorrow. Not so Louis de Bernieres, whose passport was dispatched by the Indian Embassy in error to a shop in Brighton. It was recovered—and then he discovered that it had no visa. So no Bernieres, either.

Undeterred, the fest organizers reshuffle panels with the same careless élan that Indira Gandhi once employed with her cabinet, and authors dash in at the eleventh hour to the rescue. This is a very good thing for some of us. When I stroll in at 10 am, I’m looking at moderating The Art of Criticism panel at 11 am with one participant, ie me. Fascinating as the prospect of interviewing myself may be, it’s a relief when Amitava Kumar (Husband of a Fanatic, Bombay-London-New York, Evidence of Suspicion) trots in, followed soon by Geoff Dyer. We turn this into a two-author conversation on Writers as Critics (general consensus: Better Than Critics as Critics, a view shared by all but the critics in the audience), and then Amit Chaudhuri joins us fresh off the Delhi-Jaipur highway.

There are horses behind the Baithak Tent, which offers Amitava Kumar an opportunity to air his critical acumen. On what critics and writers think about popular but Not Literary bestseller writers, such as a certain Shobha De, he gestures at the horses:
“From where we sit, the refreshing smell of manure wafts in from time to time and we breathe this air, along with the very pleasant breezes of Diggi Palace. But we might not want to breathe it all the time.”

It says "fiction" on the back cover
Geoff Dyer, author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, on the difference between writing fiction and writing autobiographically:
“My character is called Jeff with a J, whereas I am Geoff-with a G.”


The Gulag Archipelago
Anne Applebaum on the difference between gulags and Guantanamo Bay:
“Guantanamo Bay was set up for prisoners of war, at the time of Afghanistan. The gulags imprisoned ordinary Russians, in a deliberately random way.” She admits the deficiencies in the Guantanamo Bay prisons, refers briefly to the ways in which it has gone wrong, but adds: “I do believe in using language accurately. There’s a difference between a prison, a concentration camp or a Nazi camp, and a gulag.”
Gulag, her authoritative history, is published in Russia by a small academic press. It’s available in 25 languages across the world—including, she stressed, most of the Baltic countries—but hard to find or read in Putin’s Russia.
One part of the discussion, ably and gently directed by Tunku Varadarajan, was especially moving. Applebaum spoke of how the era of the gulags, once documented by Solzhenitsyn, had vanished from the media and from the official histories—but not been wiped from the collective memory. “It’s still so close—only a generation away. Your taxi driver may have an uncle who was in the gulags. A neighbour knows a cousin who died there.” In libraries across Russia, she met with an almost frantic eagerness, once the staff discovered what she was working on. "Have you read this? And this?" librarians would ask, pulling out histories, journals, diaries, letters. "Let me find that volume for you."
That eagerness reflects the need to make sure that a history that may not be spoken of will nevertheless be documented; as Applebaum noted, the truth of how the gulags were built and run were only released over the last decade. The agreement to erase, or maintain a silence about, or forget the gulag years is then only an agreement to wipe it from the official memory; not the folk memory.
In the little gulag literature I’ve read, a curious detail: there are relatively few references to “a gulag”, almost always to “the gulags”. At some point in the history of the Holocaust, the camps were referred to by their names-Auschwitz, Belsen, Dachau—but most often collectively as “the camps”—few are dispatched to “a camp”, or “a gulag”. You might go to “a prison” in a normal country; but it will be to “the gulags”, as though we understand that these structures have acquired a collective horror that wipes out individual differences between one place and another. I could be wrong here, but I would like to re-read the gulag shelves to make sure.

It's all about the navel-gazing
It is also confirmed that, as in his author photograph, H M Naqvi (author of Home Boy) believes in wearing his tops unzipped to either navel or at the very least, chest. This is perfectly acceptable fashion, and Naqvi can carry it off. But by evening, I notice at least two photographers, blessed with far more flabby embonpoint than Naqvi, with their shirts unbuttoned to below-chest levels. I am contemplating adding this to the list of Things Writers Should Be More Responsible About.

Packing them in
The organizers were apparently worried that they might not have much of an audience on day one, what with the weather and the traffic and uncooperative airlines. The morning sessions, with or without Soyinka and company, are packed: over a hundred people squeeze into the Baithak for the criticism session and the Applebaum session, and at least 50-70 for the Claire Tomalin/ Austen sessions, twice that for the Adaptations session (with Rahul Bose, Michael Frayn & co). Gulzar, Shabani Azmi and Om Puri reading from Tughlaq draw audiences in the hundreds.
Overheard, from a Jaipur local on his cellphone: “Yes, yes, fest is a big success. (He looks from the Baithak to the packed Mughal tent.) Lefthand tent AND righthand tent. It is popular on BOTH sides.”

The old razzle-dazzle
The day closes with the Alexander McCall Smith session, called Tea Time For The Traditionally Built. (William Dalrymple, conducting the conversation, explains carefully that the title has no reference to the girth of either of the gentlemen on the podium.) It’s a hilarious, you-had-to-be-there session, but here’s a small sample. McCall Smith is asked whether he found it difficult as a man to write about women, of traditional builds or otherwise.
“Authors have to get into the shoes of very many characters.” Then he thinks about it:
“I think some male authors quite enjoy getting into a woman’s shoes.”
Literary cross-dressing, says William D, and the evening continues with enough in the way of Jaipur brass bands, sparkly lights, fire-jugglers and Rajasthani folk dancers for me and Dilip Simeon to argue that this isn’t really a lit-fest, despite the august presence of the likes of Roberto Calasso, Nayantara Sahgal, Tenzing Tsundue and some of the most interesting of the Dalit writers. This, we agree, is really the Great Indian Wedding in masquerade, right down to the squabbling biradari, the grumbling auntyji who needs constant appeasement, and the flourishing of clan feuds and alliances among the various branches of high and low literature.

Scenes from Diggi Palace

(Published in the Business Standard, January 23, 2007)

“Mr Rushdie,” said the girl, “What was your first reaction to the fatwa? Was it a) hurt b) shock c) anger or d) like in Amar Prem, did you think, ‘kuch to log kehenge’?” She had beaten everyone else to the mike as Salman Rushdie concluded the best-attended session at the Jaipur Literature Festival in Diggi Palace this Sunday.

Even Rushdie, who’d handled Barkha Dutt’s questions with élan, was flummoxed. “I can assure you,” he said carefully, “that Amar Prem was not what came to mind when the fatwa was pronounced against me.”

Rushdie was the big story at Jaipur’s third—and most ambitious—literary festival in as many years. He dropped in at Jerry Pinto’s readings from the book on Helen, the legendary cabaret dancer, and watched videos of her wriggling to ‘Mera Naam Chin Chin Choo’ with evident pleasure. He dealt with great charm with autograph-seeking schoolgirls and rather less charm with intrusive journalists.

Asked why he’d been so hard on the Indian army in Kashmir when they were only following orders, he was blunt: “Because ‘only doing my job’ was not an excuse in Nuremberg.” He dropped tantalizing hints about his next book, which is partly set in Fatehpur Sikri. He was casually incendiary on the subject of Islam, dismissing the burkha sharply: “It’s not such a good idea to put half the human race in a bag.” As the flashbulbs went off outside and a dozen mikes were thrust in his face, I thought of what he’d said about authors in the 18th century, when Robinson Crusoe was printed in big bold letters and Daniel Defoe in much smaller print: “The books could go out and be famous, the authors could stay home and write.” Not any more.

The festival billed its stars as “Kiran Desai, Rushdie and 25 more!”, though it was really the “25 more!” who provided some of the best moments at what’s been India’s most relaxed, most enjoyable lit fest so far. Intellectuals deplored the absence of serious discussion, presumably the kind conducted by six-member panels; the rest of us said a silent Amen and went off to have fun. William Dalrymple did his Mughal thing—dastangoi and readings from The Last Mughal--against the backdrop of Amer Fort. It was beautifully done, even though Delhi’s finest, who have attended anywhere from one to four similar readings in the last year, had to work hard to banish a slight sense of déjà vu.

“I can dream in all three languages—English, Hindi and Pahari,” said Ira Pande during a discussion of Diddi, her book about her mother, the Hindi writer Shivani. “Hindi, Marathi, Bengali—these languages will always survive. It’s the little languages that we’re losing, like Kumaoni, which has different words for smells, just as the Eskimos have different words for snow.”

The next day, Amit Chaudhuri pointed out that the history of so-called “vernacular” or our languages often emerged from accidental rather than natural turns. He spoke of O V Vijayan, writing in English until he went back to a village and discovered, in that writer’s words, that the village became his teacher, of Michael Madhusudan Dutt discovering his “Bengali” voice by accident. Later that evening, two writers, one from India and one from Pakistan, would fight a pitched battle on the subject of Urdu and Hindustani: the language wars were leaking into cocktail party territory. And the halls were just as packed for Seemantini Raghav’s beautifully pitched reading from the works of her father, the late Ranghe Raghav, as they were for rising stars on the English horizon like the young poet Tishani Doshi.

Outside, authors armed with manuscripts stalked unwary publishers and agents. “Madam, have you seen Mr Oddbin?” said one. “Mr Oddbin? No—I don’t think I know him.” “Yes, yes, Mr Oddbin. Arundhati Roy’s publisher? You were talking to him earlier,” he said accusingly. “I have something special for him. Other authors write trilogies, no?” He extracted what looked like the Complete OED from a large bag. “I have written a fourlogy.” I glanced over to where David Godwin was chatting with friends, and felt a sudden pang of pity for the UK literary agent. “I think he may have left for Delhi,” I said, lying through my teeth. The man departed in search of fresh prey.

As the evening chill set in over the lawns of Diggi Palace and we moved into the cheerfully kitsch main hall, poetry ruled. Keki Daruwalla, Jeet Thayil and Jane Bhandari read from the works of the late Dom Moraes, Nissim Ezekiel and Arun Kolatkar, and for a while, Bombay’s poets came alive in Jaipur. The next day, Urdu poet Sheen Kaaf Nizam read to a huge audience, though some of them were there to hold seats in anticipation of the Rushdie reading. A few bucked the trend: “Won’t you stay for Rushdie?” one connoisseur of poetry asked another. “Oh, does he also write shayari? No? Then I’ll take my leave, thank you.” Rushdie is, of course, a big story. For almost everybody.