Pramod Kumar, director, Jaipur Virasat Foundation, is exhausted but this is the pleasantest kind of exhaustion. The first edition of the literature festival conceived by Kumar as an addition to the foundation’s annual heritage fest has just come to an end, and it’s been a satisfying experience for all concerned.
But his mind is already ticking over as he looks ahead to next year. “The event needs to be made more expansive in future,” he says. “We also hope to spread it over a week in subsequent editions.”
While the 5th Annual Jaipur Heritage International Festival was held between January 14-23 in 28 venues across the city, the literary fest took place on only the last three days and was restricted to the Diggi Palace. Naturally, some of the programmes clashed.
“We are considering organising it separately from the rest of the festival so that there’s no overlapping,” says Kumar. The other principal ground for improvement, he feels, is that there could have been greater publisher participation, “and we would also have liked to see interactions between writers in other languages”. Later, author-diplomat Pavan Varma echoes this last point. “I did feel a little bad that most of the events were for an English-speaking audience,” Varma says.
On the whole, however, given that the festival was put together on a small budget and that some last-minute cancellations briefly threw the schedule out of gear, it was a noteworthy effort. You wouldn’t call it a lavish event, but this in a sense was its great charm since it translated into small but enthusiastic audiences, and a merciful lack of mediapersons running about with cameras and microphones in search of “celebrity authors” — which meant it was possible for writers like Hari Kunzru, Shobhaa De, Namita Gokhale and William Dalrymple to mingle with the crowd and discuss their work rather than switch into P3P mode. This gave the festival a flavour that is usually missing from, say, the ostentatious book events held in big cities like Delhi.
The nature of the talks and discussions varied with the individual speakers. William Dalrymple moved about the stage as he revisited some of the territory covered in his last book — White Mughals — drawing the audience in with the style familiar to those of us who have seen his gifts as a raconteur up close.
Namita Gokhale on the other hand preferred to remain seated on the elevated platform, an ornate lamp by her side, reading excerpts from her books — but beneath this static approach was a vivacity, and a piquant sense of humour. (When asked why she always writes in the first person, she replies, “That way I can pretend a mistake is the narrator’s, not mine!”)
Little wonder that the authors themselves were generous in their endorsements. Dalrymple was particularly effusive, calling it “one of the best fests I’ve been to, an amazing achievement on a shoestring budget”. And Kunzru felt Jaipur was a wonderful place for such events —“the right atmosphere, enthusiastic people and venues scattered over a relatively small area”.
VIGNETTES
Predictably, the largest crowds show up for the Shobhaa De reading; the lady’s superstar status is in little doubt. College girls line up for autographs, photographers queue up as well, and briefly the event gets the celebrity sheen. When De reads out wry passages from her books, shoulders in the audience can be see convulsing in laughter; the level of participation here is higher than at any of the other readings. She nicely plays off her image too: “A little reaction please!” she exclaims when no one claps after she’s finished a reading. “We were too breathtaken to react!” a front-bencher stammers apologetically.
Hari Kunzru reads from his The Impressionist, the story of an Indian who manages to dissemble as an Englishman because of his unusual skin colour. As a half-Indian who has grown up in the UK himself, Kunzru talks about how he often gets slotted. “It feels odd when people say, oh you’re so lucky, you have the best of two cultures — like I’ve been handed two goodie-bags. But no one experiences culture like that: it’s more like the sum of everything that makes me.”
“I’d like to write a futuristic book,” he says, mentioning his fascination with the ways in which humans interact with technology. “We treat the Net like a moody living organism. It’s like discussing the weather; we say things like ‘oh, it looks like it’s going to be slow today’.”
“Having fun is crucial” is the central point made by Zubaan Books editor Anita Roy at her talk on how to tell children stories. Roy recounts the conservatism of 1950s America (“which has parallels with contemporary India, and the question of what kids should read”) and the emergence of Theodore Geisel/Dr Seuss, whose books (with their brilliant play on the sound and rhythm of words) revolutionised children’s literature. “Let’s hope a similar leap of imagination occurs in India,” she says. “There are many new issues facing children in today’s world and there’s scope for writing that deals with these in exciting ways. We must move beyond Enid Blyton and the Panchatantra now.
Scenes from a festival
Jai Arjun Singh / New Delhi Jan 28, 2006, 17:49 IST
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