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| Sunil Sethi: A page-turner in Pink City | | Jaipur literary festival has become a model for other similar fests in India |
| Sunil Sethi / New Delhi Jan 24, 2009, 00:09 IST |
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Jaipur: It wasn’t the big boys of the world of letters like Vikram Seth and William Dalrymple or opinion-makers such as Nandan Nilekani and Shashi Tharoor who had audiences eating out of their hands this week at Jaipur’s fourth literary festival, but a youthful-looking (though prematurely grey) boy from Allahabad. Diplomat Vikas Swarup, whose thriller Q & A has given rise to the international blockbuster Slumdog Millionaire took to the stage like a dab hand. “Don’t forget I’m a diplomat,” he shot back in response to a question about being an after-hours writer. “When I ask someone to go to hell I make sure they enjoy the ride.”
If Vikas Swarup’s one-liners and Amitabh Bachchan’s appearance to promote one more lavish tome on himself gave the lit-fest requisite widescreen glamour, there were plenty of highbrow specialists, novelists, genre writers, journalists and others hitching a ride on the literary bandwagon to give Jaipur a much-needed boost in a low-volume tourist season. For one, the five-day lit-fest has largely disentangled itself from the state government patronage of previous years; for another it’s in the hands of people like William Dalrymple and Namita Gokhale who know their writing and are well-hooked with other writers, and they have brought in a professional events company to run it. They’ve expanded the guest list, telescoped the venues at a single location and developed a wide-ranging programme to add value to debates, interactions and readings with quality concerts and entertainment from India and abroad—Bauls from Bengal, Salman Ahmad of the band Junoon from Pakistan, Tamil pop diva Susheela Raman and so on.
Writers may principally spend their time in libraries or in solitary surroundings but sooner or later they must step out into the world of editors, publishers, booksellers and, crucially, their readers. A total of 167 authors were present at Jaipur, international names like Simon Schama, Patrick French, Colin Thubron, Thomas Keneally and Pico Iyer, but also scholars, Wendy Doniger, Nayanjot Lahiri, Ashis Nandy, Christopher Jaffrelot among them. Among younger writers, everyone from Chetan Bhagat to Hari Kunzru, Lijia Zhang to Rana Dasgupta came, delivered their piece, and went.
You could take a wide pick of talking heads in three simultaneous venues with an almost bafflingly large range of subject matter—In search of Sanskrit? Try Sheldon Pollock and Ananya Vajpeyi in the tented baithak. Want to crack the fashion conspiracy? Ritu Kumar and Nicholas Coleridge delivering hot tips in the durbar hall. And who better than Prasoon Joshi, Nandita Das and Nasreen Munni Kabir for a session on scripting for Bollywood?
But no festival is worth its salt without the surprise of the new. At Jaipur it was the presence of a second flush of the most admired fiction writers in English from the subcontinent who, now that India has had its glory days, are Pakistani. Nadeem Aslam talked about The Wasted Vigil, his new novel set in Afghanistan; Mohd Hanif, the BBC correspondent whose politically subversive thriller, A Case of Exploding Mangoes, was greatly admired last year; and Daniyal Mueenuddin whose first book of short stories, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders, is a worthy competitor to Jhumpa Lahiri. At any other time the trio may have been lost under the Jaipur tents but at this twisted juncture in India-Pakistan relations their appearance was heart-warming and their views much in demand.
Literary festivals are legion round the world, as distinct from the big book fairs; there is a reputable lineup in praise of the written word that stretches from Adelaide to Galle to Cheltenham and beyond the Atlantic. Jaipur is the first in India that has shown ambition, imagination and gumption. It has become a model for others, such as the one in Kovalam last autumn. But in cash-strapped times it isn’t easy to put a lit-fest on the road—despite a long string of sponsors the festival organizers were running into a deficit. It would be a pity if the Pink City shows its home-grown lit-fest the pink slip.
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