Reading Pushkar

Q&A: Mita Kapur, CEO of the literary consultancy Siyahi

The Pushkar Camel Fair is one of the most colourful annual festivals in India. Starting this year, a one-day literary event is being added to its busy calendar. On October 31, the Pushkar Literature Festival will bring together such writers as Namita Gokhale, Prasoon Joshi, Pavan Varma and the Urdu poet Sheen Kaaf Nizam over seven sessions that will explore the meeting points between contemporary literature and folklore, oral traditions, myths and legends. Mita Kapur, CEO of the literary consultancy Siyahi, helped initiate the event. Jai Arjun Singh speaks to her.

How did the idea for this literature festival come about? Why Pushkar?
Like most of Siyahi’s plans, the Pushkar Literature Festival was a spontaneous idea, its genesis being a friendly conversation with Manjit Singh, director, Rajasthan Tourism Development Corporation. He wants Pushkar to be the cynosure of international attention and asked me whether we would like to organise a one-day literary event. I said yes.

You played a big role in starting the Jaipur Literature Festival a few years ago. Will there be a different focus at the Pushkar festival?
It’s a special challenge to initiate a festival against a backdrop as colourful and spiritual as Pushkar. In planning our sessions, we have focused on the Indian voice, the Indian identity. There are questions about the great epic Mahabharata, there is a talk on what contemporary India means to a traveller, there is passion reflected in our poetry in Hindi as well as the delicate nuances of Urdu shayari. There is also a debate on how fiction and reportage work together, or how they clash with each other. We’ve tried to make the content well-rounded; of course, there is only so much one can do in a day!

Do you see this fest becoming as big as the Jaipur festival has become? Will it be possible to get a large crowd of book-lovers to this setting?
Pushkar has a pulse and rhythm of its own, it’s a riot of colour and chaos, it already pulls in a lot of people from all over. It’s a microcosm of so much that India as a country is. There will always be challenges, of course… starting with the finances.

What sessions are you particularly enthusiastic about?
Sheen Kaaf Nizam’s session with Prasoon Joshi will combine the lucidity and passion of Prasoon’s poetry with Nizam sahib’s shayari. Then, Veddan Sudhir from Udaipur is doing a Katha Kahani session, orally narrating folk tales and legends, fusing them with the current cultural, political, social scenario.

It will really be a matter of getting words and voices heard over all the cacophony that marks this week-long fair — there will be camel cart races, folk dances, impromptu bands of villagers breaking into songs in their dialects. There is a strange mixture of spiritual, emotional and commercial frenzy here, and there is one common thread that unites all those who come to Pushkar: it’s the most apt place to congregate to narrate stories and to engage in debates, because this place excites all sorts of sentiments.

In that sense, it’s a very good setting for a literary festival.

For more details on the festival, see the programme at www.siyahi.in/pushkar-literature-festival-2009-program.html