The JLF columns: Unhearing the words

(Published in the Business Standard on January 23rd and 24th; both were written at the Jaipur Literature Festival. This is the first piece.)


There were two Jaipur Literature Festivals this year. The first was the festival that attracts readers by the thousands, to hear celebrities like Oprah, writers of the calibre of Tom Stoppard or Bama Faustina, to have their books signed by Chetan Bhagat, Kapil Sibal and other literary heavyweights. This festival was a grand success, drawing record crowds. (Also see: Ten of the Best.)

The other Jaipur festival was the one that Salman Rushdie couldn’t attend, after being informed of threats to his life that appear not to have been actually made. At this festival, when Amitava Kumar, Jeet Thayil, Hari Kunzru and Ruchir Joshi read excerpts from Rushdie's banned novel, The Satanic Verses, in protest at the writer’s absence, they were asked to leave; the festival that had been willing to take on the burden of the security concerns raised by the invitation to Rushdie was unable to guarantee their safety.

For a brief while, it seemed as though the JLF itself might have to shut down, as the organisers and the authorities tried to measure the possible fallout from this form of dissent, and to calculate the possible risks, which were considerable. But as session after session, from the ones on censorship and protest to the conversation on the Enlightenment between AC Grayling and Steven Pinker, noted and protested Rushdie’s absence and discussed the actions of the Gang of Four, the debate over free speech became intense — and polarising.

The lines were rapidly drawn, and the argument that played out over the next few days at the Diggi Palace was fascinating in the accuracy with which it reflected the debates over free speech in India in the last ten years. Many writers were angry and uncomfortable with what S Anand, independent publisher, memorably called the organisers’ pusillanimity and their failure to defend the writers’ right to extreme gestures of dissent. Several writers didn’t see why reading out from a book, even if it was a banned one, should be wrong at a festival of literature, especially when that festival had panels on censorship and dissent.

But the organisers’ actions, however right or wrong they may have been, should be seen in another light — as the actions of decent people, and as an accurate reflection of what civil society does when it finds the space it holds precious under threat. By and large, decent people in India have not defended the extreme and the margins; they have defended only the mainstream, the centre.

The argument most often heard at the festival was that reading from The Satanic Verses was an illegal act. This was presented as a matter of fact, but there is some doubt over this (*in fact, it is not illegal), and some lawyers say there are loopholes — the publication, distribution and dissemination of the physical book is clearly banned, but there isn’t as much clarity over the question of whether reading an excerpt is illegal.

The real fear was an understandable one. The JLF, to a great extent, opened up the space for literary festivals, and many people genuinely fear that this space may be threatened, by gestures of dissent or by the evocation of a banned book that has, truly, become the book that must not be named. Writers like Chetan Bhagat spoke about the need for authors to be more responsible, to refrain, in the tired old phrase, from hurting religious sentiments.

Much of this speculation and many of the arguments that the Gang of Four, so to speak, had stepped across a line was of great interest, but it suffered from a major flaw. The four authors who had held a peaceful, non-violent reading in the festival’s halls were not there to speak for themselves. Rushdie, who had chatted with friends and readers and addressed crowds on these lawns in 2007, was not here to speak for himself, and at the time of writing, there was a question over whether he would be allowed to speak over the video-link.

The problem for the JLF is not the present situation, but the future of the festival. It is very easy to ensure that this sort of incident doesn’t happen again — don’t invite the potentially incendiary. Keep the public commons of the festival safe by retaining the entertaining sessions, and allow some space for free speech. That seems reasonable enough. But the question is, who’s going to decide what that space will be? And when someone crosses another line, who will draw that line for us?

(This was the second part, written on the day that the JLF organisers were bullied by protestors and couldn't have the Rushdie conversation on videolink.)

Five minutes before Barkha Dutt is supposed to speak to Salman Rushdie via videolink at the Jaipur Literature Festival, the air is thick with tension. News reports say that the festival directors have received death threats. In the lawns, a tight knot of protestors declare their intention to disrupt the proceedings if the Rushdie conversation goes ahead.

The crowds at the Palace watch with more curiosity than fear, at this point. There are three rings around the protestors, with the police and the media adding concentric layers around that small, tight knot.

What happened to trigger this? An invitation was sent to a writer; a book he had written over 23 years ago was read out to an audience who listened politely and then continued on their way to the rest of the festival without rioting. That was all, but that seems to be enough.

Festival organiser Sanjay Roy announces that the conversation with Rushdie cannot take place because of the very real threat of violence, the presence of people who, in his words, are offended not just by the idea of Rushdie’s presence at the festival, but by his image on the screen. As he and the rest of the team come down off the stage, they receive a sympathetic round of applause. They had no other choice, in the circumstances.

This is the way in which the conversation on free speech has gone for far too long. Step across this line, and risk violence — or worse, be blackmailed by people who will threaten other people with violence.

There are some things that are unlikely to happen. The writers who read from The Satanic Verses earlier at the festival are facing cases, and the organisers face threats as well as cases.

But the protestors who moved so freely through the crowds just a few minutes ago are unlikely to face legal action for the threats of disruption they made, nor are the people who made death threats against the organisers likely to appear in a court any time soon. This violence is always one-way, to the point where the simple act of reading is interpreted as an equivalent act of violence, even though, as Hari Kunzru pointed out, a book is neither a bomb nor a knife.

At the centre of this circus is a book that refuses to die. As news stories have reported, it is actually not illegal to read The Satanic Verses, or to read out from it — the book is banned under a section of the Customs Act that prohibits its import and distribution in the country, but the law does not ban the reading of the book. Public readings were held at the time of the book ban twenty years ago, and a public reading being held today as a form of protest is merely echoing an old tradition. Private readings of The Satanic Verses have become so much easier once it became available on the Internet.

A festival might choose, for reasons of public safety, in Tarun Tejpal’s words, not to turn the lawns of the festival into the site of a “bloody battle”. The argument for keeping the festival safe and neutral is being made as I write, and after witnessing the protests, few people here will disagree, unfortunately. Free speech battles, bloody or not, will be left outside the gates of Diggi Palace in future — the festival will continue, but in considerably different form.

But it isn’t possible to step away from the book itself any more, if only because the “other side” will not let The Satanic Verses go. In a looking glass world where a book reading is considered equivalent to an act of violent provocation, perhaps it’s worthwhile asking why a book banned 23 years ago refuses to lie down and be forgotten. Many banned books drop into the black hole of irrelevance, and either the ideas or the language they contain are often rendered obsolete by time.

The real problem with The Satanic Verses is that those who wanted the book banned have not been able to ban the ideas in the novel; how do you separate the language from the content, the text from Rushdie’s philosophy? Today’s demand, for instance, from the protestors was not just that Rushdie be silenced; it was a demand that he not be seen. And what is becoming apparent is that the only thing that would pacify Rushdie’s protestors would be for the book to be unwritten, the words to be taken back. As the author Lionel Shriver said in a different context today, this is what is deadly about the written word: it cannot be taken back.

Somewhere deep in their bones, the people who would rather shut down a festival or threaten people with death than listen to an author understand this: The Satanic Verses cannot be unwritten, and its ideas cannot be erased. The central fact of the Verses is not that it’s blasphemous; it’s that the book argues that religion may be no more than the creation of humans and may be questioned as such. A day before, Richard Dawkins asked why the only prejudice we kowtow to is religious prejudice. One answer today is that it comes armed and dangerous into our lives, ready to kill for its certainties.

Perhaps the fear of violence will prevail, in the short run. But this fear has already taken too many prisoners. What became clear today is that if you cannot safely read from The Satanic Verses today, you cannot step away from it either — the book and what it stands for follow us everywhere we go. Even into spaces that were meant to be safe, and free.

Ten of the best: JLF sessions

The official recordings of the sessions by Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzru, Jeet Thayil and Ruchir Joshi where the writers read out from the Satanic Verses as a gesture of protest are not available on the festival site. Ten other discussions/ readings that stood out for me:

1) Michael Ondaatje, discussing Cat’s Cradle with Amitava Kumar.

2) David Remnick and Samanth Subramanian on Obama, with enthusiastic participation by JLF’s cows.

3) Samit Basu on building imaginary worlds—one of the few talks at the JLF that focused sharply on the craft of writing.

4) Gulzar, Mohammed Hanif, Madan Gopal: poetry from both sides of the border. This gets going after the first 10-15 minutes.

5) Philip Gourevitch on war: “Genocide has an order.”

6) AC Grayling and Steven Pinker on the Enlightenment, free speech and much more.

7) Cheeran, Charu Nivedita, Gogu Shyamala, Satchidanandan and S Anand on the literature of dissent.

The first two minutes, where S Anand reads out a lovely quote from the Satanic Verses, is missing from the tape—it shouldn’t be, because it’s not illegal to read passages from the book, and the JLF shouldn’t be sanitizing writers’ sessions.

Anand read these lines: “What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accommodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world.”

8) Ayesha Jalal on Holy Wars and the need to reclaim the meaning of the word ‘jihad’.

9) Two favourite writers in conversation: Teju Cole and Ben Okri.

10) Katherine Boo and Aman Sethi on writing beyond the "beautiful forevers".


Out of my sessions—enjoyed listening to Kiran Nagarkar and Rahul Bhattacharya’s exuberantly “vulgar” readings, the conversation with Lionel Shriver: and my husband’s injunction to the audience after he was pulled in at the last moment to moderate the Richard Dawkins session: "If your questions go over 25 words, I’ll take back the mike."

JLF: excerpts

On writing with the reader in mind:

Martin Amis: I never think of you. No, I think you’re dead if you’re writing for a certain reader.
Richard Ford: I couldn’t disagree more. I think if you don’t have a public, you don’t have a self as a writer. Get outside your room, get into the lives and houses of others, and live and reside there away from yourself.
Junot Diaz: For me, by having an audience member, an audience type in mind, it creates an economy of signification. If I’m writing to a universal undifferentiated mass, I might even have to explain what a table is, yeah? It means that I’m writing with a certain idea of what I don’t have to describe, or what I do have to describe… and as a reader you know that there is pleasure to be gained from feeling that you are being spoken to directly by a book, and there is a pleasure to be gained by feeling that you are overhearing something not meant for you.
Q&A, Martin Amis, Jay McInerney, Junot Diaz, Richard Ford: from The Crisis of American Fiction

On storytelling:
Jim Crace: When you think of the traditions of storytelling in the whole world, from the Anansi legends of Nigeria, or the sagas of Iceland, the puppet plays of Indonesia, or the many myths of India, of course—the people who wrote those weren’t writing autobiographically. They were writing on behalf of the community, and that’s what I’ve rather pompously ended up doing. I believe that storytelling is one of the jewels in the crown of the human species. It’s the twin of consciousness. It’s the one thing that we do that no other creature in the world does, which is to constantly reinterpret and reinvent the world through narrative. That’s why I’m a writer, that’s why I’m passionate about being a writer.
The Jim Crace session: on storytelling, mining the past and why you should make up your own epigraphs

How to find a subject of absorbing interest to your audience:
Without comment, Jeet Thayil’s reading: a brief lexicon of Indian chuts, chuts in waiting, chuts by association, and the perfectionism of chutiyadom.


On language and Urdu:
Javed Akhtar: “Yeh zubaan hoti kya hai? Is your language the script? Is it the vocabulary? If I say, “yeh tent airconditioned nahi hai?” kya yeh Angrezi hai? The two most important words in this sentence are English, but is that an English sentence? So we’re beginning to understand that language is not the script, not the vocabulary; it’s the grammar, it’s the syntax.
(Reads a simple sentence and deconstructs it: that word is Persian, that word Turkish, that word Persian again, that word English, that word Arabic.)

I was once asked, Javed, yeh Urdu to Babar ke saath aayi thi, na?
Maine kaha, haan, woh ghode pe aa raha tha, Urdu burkha pehen ke peeche peeche aa rahi thi.
Javed Akhtar on Urdu.

JLF: writers, voices of

Martin Amis on writing about sex:
“It’s impossible to write autobiographically about sex. What voice can you use: ‘Bravo, I took her again in the morning?’”

and on writing:

“To accuse a novelist of egotism is like accusing a boxer of violence.”
“But writing is not a collaborative art. A writer comes most alive when they are alone.”
“If life is a foot, fiction is a shoe.”

Junot Diaz in an earlier interview on writing for applause:
“And I spent ten years writing Oscar Wao, and I definitely didn’t spend the ten years being like, “I’m amazing! This has taken ten years, because this much genius requires a decade!” [laughter] I spent the whole time, you know, fucked up, unhappy, really miserable and convinced that I’d ruined the whole thing, and all the stuff you get when you spend a really long time lost in the desert. I think more than anything, my basic lesson as an artist has been humility. So when I get a bunch of stuff, like “Do you want to come to this thing, do you want to come to that thing?” I say to myself “Do I want to go to this because I want applause? Do I want applause to make up for the fact that my mommy never held me enough? Or is this something where I feel I can be of service, is this an event where I can be of service?” That’s the way I choose.”

And at the JLF on applause:
“Most books look for applause, a reinforcement of current day ideas. Books are a work of art. They should look to add something, not seek applause. Otherwise it is the society asking us to do the monkey dance so that they can clap. And sadly most seem to be dancing.”

Richard Ford on reading:
"I just read. I don't work with such distinctions of culture. When I read an Indian novel in English, I think I am reading a novel. I don't think that I have to put on my Indian hat, because this is going to be a book by Indians about Indians. When I read, I try to make sense of the work in terms of a system of values that I understand. The idea is to be comfortable with things that I don't understand.”

Nam Le on being marginalized:
"One thing I like about the literary world, there are enough hurt feelings to go around. I imagine that even as we speak, there is a white, male, middle-aged writer sitting in Brooklyn complaining about being sidelined by foreign exotica."

Orhan Pamuk on “Turkish love”:
"When I write about love, the critics in the US and Britain say that this Turkish writer writes very interesting things about Turkish love. Why can''t love be general? I am always resentful and angry of this attempt to narrow me and my capacity to experience this humanity. When non-Western authors express this humanity through their work their humanity is reduced to their nation''s humanity.”

Speaking Volumes: The Jaipur Litfest Primer

(Published in the Business Standard, January 3, 2010)

Perhaps the only way to understand the Jaipur Literature Festival is to think of a traditional mehfil crossed with a darbar. Over six years, the JLF has grown from a sleepy, intimate local festival held on the lawns of the eccentric Diggi Palace to Asia’s largest literary festival, packed with authors and celebrities (the two sometimes, but not always, overlap) from around the world.
Here’s a quick look at what to expect between the 21st and the 25th, and at some of the questions that the JLF raises:
1) The Visitors: Jaipur insists it doesn’t have stars, but every year brings a raft of celebrity writers from India and elsewhere—Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Wole Soyinka, UR Anathamurthy and Simon Schama have shown up at the Diggi Palace in past years. JM Coetzee, the South African writer and Nobel laureate, is expected; so are Orhan Pamuk and perhaps Martin Amis.

I’m looking forward to Richard Ford, Jim Crace, Jung Chang and Ahdaf Soueif; also Patrick French, James Kelman and Irvine Welsh, the latter notorious for his adrenaline-spiked readings, are also expected. Among the younger writers, keep an eye out for the brilliant Junot Diaz, for Nam Le, author of The Boat, and for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

2) The Home Team: Along with Vikram Seth and Kiran Desai, expect to meet some of Asia’s most interesting writers. Bant Singh, the Dalit singer, is an iconic figure of resistance in Punjab; the agricultural labourer is now an activist celebrated for his poetry of protest, and has survived a vicious attack on him in 2006 after he sought justice for the rape of his daughter. His session should carry on the JLF tradition of encouraging voices of protest, from Bama to Om Prakash Valmiki, in earlier years.

Among the list of Indian writers in English, keep an eye out for Rana Dasgupta, whose Solo was one of the most rewarding novels of 2009, graphic novelist and artist Sarnath Banerjee and “cancer biographer” Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of The Emperor of Maladies. A focus on Kashmiri writers and Urdu writing looks promising, and make space on the programme for activists like Aruna Roy and water maven Anupam Misra.

3) The Sideshows: In line with Margaret Drabble’s complaints that Hay-on-Wye had become less intimate and more crowded with celebrities, the JLF is very different from its first, quietly literary avatar. Old hands complain, with some justice, that the music performances every evening and “star” writers of the Chetan Bhagat variety have turned Jaipur into a tamasha. As one of my friends from the fashion world discovered to her delight last year, it’s possible to be at the Jaipur Literature Festival and have a grand old time without attending a single session on writing or reading.

This year packs in a ton of stuff: a small showcase on children’s writings, the announcement of the winner of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, performances by some of Asia’s best musicians and performance poets. As with Hay, and increasingly, Edinburgh, it’s up to the individual festival-goer to craft his or her programme. Go for just the music and to hang out with the Beautiful People at the bar behind the speaker’s venues, and Jaipur will be just another extended party; choose your sessions carefully and this could be the feast of ideas it was originally meant to be.

4) The Celeb Factor: Is the JLF all about the celebrity writers, as more than one media columnist has suggested? The problem with this perception is that it doesn’t match the experience on the ground. A recent piece talks about how the importance of the festival lies in the big names that it draws from the world of Western publishing, and to some extent, that’s true—people will queue up this year to listen to Coetzee, as they had in previous years to hear John Berendt on Venice and Savannah or Anne Applebaum’s impassioned discussion of gulags. But what the criticism omits is that the breathless focus on just the McEwans and the Rushdies is entirely a media creation.

For those who’ve been to several years of the festival, some of the best sessions have had massive audience support, but little press: the debate between Dilip Simeon and Nandini Sundar last year on the Maoist insurgency, for instance, or Anupam Misra’s spellbinding talk on the drying up of Indian rivers, or Sheen Kaaf Nizam’s standing-room-only poetry reading.

That’s another thing the media doesn’t report. There was the year the slam poets rocked Jaipur, with Jason doing his beatbox thing while poet Jeet Thayil unleashed his blues side, the year Gulzar and Javed Akhtar held an overflowing audience captive, the year that Tenzin Tsundue read his protest poems on Tibet. If there’s any group of writers the Jaipur Literature Festival belongs to, it’s not the celebrities—it’s always been the poets, in the end.

(The festival schedule is up here.)

Jaipur Literature Festival: finallyfinally

(I promise, this is the last of the updates--my column for the Business Standard, which reprises some of the stuff in the blog posts. For a really thoughtful critique of the festival, see Namita Bhandare's take. It's funny how possessive all of us who've been attending the JLF from year one or two onwards feel about it.)

Every great literary festival in the world leans on its location: Edinburgh has its arts festival, the castles, the cobblestoned streets and the pubs, Hay-on-Wye is the world’s only literary town, paved with bookshops, and Jaipur is a mela. The Jaipur lit fest has the regulation camels-and-elephants, fire dancers, the Kawas brass bands and Darohar recitations, though this year it’s overflowing the bounds of the tiny Diggi Palace.



The crowds this year dwarf the 200-odd souls who used to make the trek to Jaipur back in 2006 and 2007 to catch what was then a tiny fest. This year, the JLF is probably Asia’s largest literary festival, and has 220 speakers and writers, and about 15-20,000 visitors. Courtesy Om Puri, Ketan Mehta and Gulzar, the film frat is here; Bina Ramani and Ritu Kumar head a fleet of fashionistas. The Delhi social swarm descend, and leave, on the weekend, so we have air-kissing all through Saturday and Sunday. But the junta reader is here, too. I meet a contingent of stalwarts from Calcutta, hordes of children from the local schools, corporate friends from Bangalore, and foreign tourists who’ve penciled “Dhzaipore” into their India itineraries.



“The conversations are different this year,” says a writer friend, and I know what she means. With every session packed—the tiniest ones draw about 60, the largest on the front lawns swell to a thousand-plus—there’s little chance to have a quiet chat. Authors are mobbed—though Gulzar and Javed Akhtar draw even more fans than a certain Mr Bhagat—but also left in peace. Roddy Doyle can sit quietly in a corner and read; Anne Enright queues up in the egalitarian lunch line; Alexander McCall Smith is interrupted by autograph-hunters, but allowed to explore the palace in relative peace.

If, as a friend says, “The Jaipur Zoo is now open to gawkers”, there are also many ordinary readers. The Jaipur police chief asks historian Maya Jassonoff a question about empire; three retired gentlemen who’ve travelled here from Lucknow debate Steve Coll and Lawrence Wright’s rightwing politics fiercely; Dalit writer Sivakami draws collegiate admirers as she speaks on what it means to be invisible, and placed in invisible ghettos, in a country and religion you can never claim.

By day three, we’re in overdrive. The writers who missed their flights or were stuck on the road earlier have shown up. In the Durbar Hall, Ayaan Hirsi Ali speaks with incendiary honesty about her view of Islam. The front lawns host Wole Soyinka, delivering a poetry reading in his deep, sonorously sensuous voice; on another day, Om Puri reads from Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq. The emperor’s doomed reign shimmers into the background as Basharat Peer, Steve Coll and others discuss a new empire; and Niall Ferguson riffs on “Chimerica”—his view of the dominant influence of China and America. On a day which starts with Vikram Chandra on the anti-thriller, continues to a magnificent reading by Roddy Doyle, followed by Louis de Bernieres and Tina Brown on adjacent stages, a critic of my acquaintance opts out. “Sensory overload,” he says. “All systems blown.”

Gulags, conspiracies and empires (new and old) travel like viral memes between sessions. Anne Applebaum describes the efficiency of Stalin’s gulags; the next day, we hear Isabel Hilton on the new barracks where Tibet’s nomads are being corralled by China. Maya Jassonoff speaks of how the boundaries between occupier and occupied are not as rigid as we had imagined; Tenzin Tsundue speaks of how America (and India) can ignore the injustice and repression perpetuated by a modern-day empire.

And always, it comes back to writing. The Dalit writers ask whether even a tiny corner of “Sahitya” will ever be theirs, as they lay claim to this category called “Dalit literature”. Claire Tomalin conjures up a vision of Jane Austen writing on very little pin-money, precarious independence, no opportunities for travel and calls on her time: “If she could find the discipline to write under those circumstances, we have little excuse.” Doyle makes us look at our lives again as he speaks of walking around cities in Ireland, aware that the history of Easter 1916 and the Second World War is one generation away, always seeing people as living stories.

“Living as research,” he says, capturing the writer’s attitude to life. Vikram Chandra waxes evangelistic about the new criticism, which looks into the reader’s brain. In one of the many performances that mark the end of each day—Amit Chaudhuri, H M Naqvi and other authors taking their turn on stage—there’s an incredible moment when one young writer makes his bow to a dead poet from another generation.

As Ali Sethi sings Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poems, you can almost see the baton passing from one generation of story-tellers to another. Jaipur 2010 has the slightly insane feel of a festival that became a great Indian wedding, but it remains true to the original promise: this is a festival that’s as much about katha as it is about tamasha, and it delivers both in equal measure.

Jaipur Literature Festival: final notes

-The Hanif Kureishi-Amitava Kumar session was a classic example of how matching the right moderator to the right writer can pay off massive dividends. The JLF had a little trouble with this, with Chetan Bhagat asking Anjum Hassan daft, condescending questions about how it felt to move from "the dressing table to the writing table". It was clearly the Teen Deviyan and One Idiot panel.

Amitava, in contrast, had done his homework and knew exactly when to push Kureishi a little and when to step back. But the audience provided the best moments. He was asked: “As a Muslim, do you consider yourself an aberration?”

Hanif’s response, “That’s a great question. Hmmm... am I an aberration? All my life I have fought against authoritarian systems, and any religion is an authoritarian system. I don’t think of myself as a Muslim.”

And then an old gentleman asked the Question of the Festival: “Mr Kureishi, my grandson was circumcised. It was very painful for him. Do you remember your circumcision? Did you feel the pain too?”

"Thank you," said Kureishi. "It’s been a long time since anyone took such an interest in my genitals.”

-My favourite audience reaction to the fest? Provided by a glamorous young fashionista in a Paris kitsch outfit and a truly gorgeous hat, who was seen exiting the Baithak tent at great speed. "Is everything all right, darling?" an equally glamorous editor asks. The fashionista grips editor's shoulder. "Darling!" she says. "They're talking about books in there!"

-Censorship works in strange ways. I'm chatting with a bunch of schoolgirls at the Full Circle bookshop. One of them buys the Tranquebar anthology of erotica, edited by Ruchir Joshi and Sister Jesme's autobiography. As we're talking, she brings out a Stephen King hardback from her rucksack, and slips the cover over Sister Jesme's book. "My parents won't let me read that," she says. I look at the erotica book. "Oh, that's all right," she explains. "The other one is anti-religion, so...."

-Local substitutes have a strange and sublime feel to them, too. By day four, the festival's running out of the Kinley and Bisleri bottles--as an aside, there has to be a better alternative to the plastic glasses, even paper cups would be less wasteful--and raiding local suppliers. "Roy!" booms an authorial voice as I reach for a glass of water. "Are you sure you want to drink that?" I look at the canister: pure, filtered water that rejoices in the brand name of PeeMee.

-"I have an idea for a book..." "Ma'am, is that Ravi Singh? (Penguin's head honcho) I want to show him my first three chapters..." "So I'm writing this really great novel, I have 30,000 words down..." There's a lot of hustling happening on the sidelines (and Ravi Singh, you owe me for steering the demented writer with the 1,200-page poetry saga about a suffering man who owns a cement factory but dreams of being a poet away from you) and as I see the book ideas, partial synopses and excerpts being thrust upon wary editors, I remember a quiet aside from Roddy Doyle: "I have never asked for an advance for a book that I haven't completed." Words to live by.

-Leaving on Republic Day; at the Clarkes Amer hotel, there's an oddly touching flag-hoisting ceremony on the lawns attended by everyone from the managerial and housekeeping staff down to the darwans. It's quite sweet, right up to the moment where we salute the flag--and a local band breaks into a very familiar song. Not Jana Gana Mana, but All Izz Well from 3 Idiots.

Jaipur Literature Festival: Ayaan Hirsi Ali

“Censorship isn’t just something imposed by the state,” says Ali Sethi. “It’s also a mental state.” Free speech isn’t one of the themes for the JLF this year, but like the various memes floating around the festival—gulags, conspiracy theories, the changing nature of freedom, the state versus the individual—it comes up in interesting ways.
Sethi talks about discovering the stories in women’s digests in Pakistan—stories that seem to parallel the stories in women’s magazines here, in their blend of conservatism and outspokenness. Intrigued, he and his friends track down the women who run one of the more popular digests, with sales of 160,000 copies a month. (There’s a moment while we compute this, given the average sales of the Indian or Pakistani writer in English.) They’re met with suspicion: why are they interested in these narratives?

“What we’re doing is not unIslamic,” they’re told. Reassured that Sethi and his friends aren’t there to accuse them, the women open up about the worlds these stories come from.

Two days later, Ayaan Hirsi Ali makes an unannounced appearance at the festival. Her arrival has been hinted at, but not revealed for security reasons: she has lived under the shadow of death threats, ever since her book Infidel came out. The media goes nuts; not so the general reader, who has now got used to Jaipur's surprises--as one schoolgirl puts it: "I turned around and bumped into Wole Soyinka! Then I turned the other way and bumped into Alexander McCall Smith!"

Most of us can’t get into the auditorium for her talk; the press of the crowds is too great; so we see her as a remote figure on the giant screens outside the Durbar Hall. She accuses the world’s liberal democracies of appeasing Islam, of being too mired in their own self-doubt and fear of betraying their own traditions to genuinely criticize or examine the more unpleasant aspects of faith and Islam.

The writer I’m standing next to is quiet during her session, but as it ends, he quotes Buruma’s review of Infidel:

“There is no doubt that many Islamic societies, especially in the Middle East, are in deep trouble for many reasons: political, historical, social, economic and religious. Revolutionary Islamism is seen by a growing number of Muslims as the only answer to failed secular dictatorships and corrupt, oil-rich elites, as well as to the economic and military domination of the United States. And European Muslims, often confused and alienated, feel its fatal attraction. Hirsi Ali is quite right that this force must be resisted. Enlightened reform of religious practices that clash with liberal democratic freedoms is necessary. But much though I respect her courage, I’m not convinced that Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s absolutist view of a perfectly enlightened West at war with the demonic world of Islam offers the best perspective from which to get this done.”

I’m reminded of the debate over Islam in Europe that raged at signandsight, drawing in Pascal Bruckner and others, not so long ago. It’s well worth re-reading.

Jaipur and All That

I've been warned that the Jaipur Literature Festival is no longer the cozy and cheerfully eccentric fest of my memories--"darling, it'll be like Polo Season out there," a friend said darkly, packing her pearls as she spoke. But I'm still fond of it for two reasons: 1) I don't have to travel to Edinburgh to listen to the likes of Jamaica Kincaid, Wole Soyinka, Vikram Chandra and Anne Applebaum and 2) the Jaipur Fest has a palace cat and horses. Off whenever the fog clears in the afternoon, or I find my pearls, whichever comes first.

Here's the list of speakers for 2010; and here's the rest of the program. I'm doing the Art of Criticism panel with Amit Chaudhuri, Geoff Dyer, Amitava Kumar and Andrew O' Hagan on the 21st, a session with Claire Tomalin and Andrew Lycett on Austen and Kipling on the 23rd, and a discussion of the short story with Mridula Koshy, Nighat Gandhi and Marc Parent on the 25th. I plan to spend the rest of the fest in a hammock, chaise-lounge, or howdah, according to availability.

Here are some posts from previous years:

1) On the delights of Diggi

2) On the "elbows out" school of poetry reading
3) On Salmagundi

Don't miss Jai's set of posts on Jaipur, here.