By Swapan Dasgupta
When I first attended the Jaipur Literature Festival
six years ago as a speaker for their concluding public debate, the event was
held in the Durbar Hall of the Diggi Palace Hotel which could, at best
accommodate some 300 people. These days, the Durbar Hall counts as among the
smaller meeting rooms for the Festival, an annual event which, this year,
registered something like two lakh ‘footfalls’—up by an astounding 80,000 from
2012.
The complaint which I have often heard, that the
Literature Festival has been transformed into a general tamasha where people
turn up for no apparent reason, is probably legitimate. This year, I was
astonished to see nearly 800 people crowd into the tent where the popular
classicist Tom Holland delivered a fascinating lecture on how Persia emerged as
the middle kingdom in the classical world. I am not sure how much of Holland’s
erudition sank in but at least there was a sense of relief that no fringe group
rushed to the dais to attack the author for his innovative interpretation of
early Islam in his earlier work In The
Shadow of the Sword.
Tom’s sibling James, nursing a black eye from a game
of cricket the day before, may have had other fears. A military historian with
nearly a dozen published works under his belt, he was understandably concerned
whether anyone at all would show up for the session on his book Dam Busters, about the 1943 air raid
that destroyed two iconic dams in western Germany. As the moderator for the
session, I shared James Holland’s anxieties. There is, after all, nothing more
dispiriting than addressing five drowsy individuals and 295 empty chairs.
We did succeed in attracting a modest gathering of
some 60 people, including many whose initiation into World War II history was
courtesy Combat comics that depicted all Germans as clumsy oafs whose
vocabulary didn’t extend beyond “achtung”
and, for some inexplicable reason, “donner
und blitzen”. They appreciated
James’ potted history of the making of the bouncing bombs, the skills and
hazards of low-flying precision bombing, and his spirited debunking of the
belief that Britain won the War by clinging to the coat-tails of the Americans.
There was even an awkward smirk on the faces of the handful of Britons when I
made a fleeting mention of Squadron Leader Guy Gibson’s black
Labrador—immortalised by the legendary 1955 film starring Michael Redgrave.
Overall, it was a lovely, quirky session that appealed to the handful that
appreciated the difference between the Lancaster and the Mosquito.
It is this appeal to minority tastes that
distinguishes the Festival in Jaipur from other similar exercises in India.
Yes, there is the ritual genuflection at the altar of ‘bhasha’ correctness, the
mandatory sessions on Bollywood (where Javed Akhtar can hold any audience
spellbound) and cricket (this year it was Rahul Dravid’s turn to be mobbed),
and the invariable celebrations of spiritualism featuring the holiest of
holies—the Dalai Lama, no less. But these, I would like to believe, is largely
to attract the sponsors. If it wasn’t for the large numbers of youngsters who
throng to Jaipur—“We never see young faces at similar events in Britain”,
Howard Jacobson (author of The Finkler Question) told me happily—the likes of
Coke, Google and Tata Steel wouldn’t have cared to sponsor a literature festival.
Two years ago, I even noticed the London Library on
St James’s Square among the sponsors. It was a noble gesture based on
hyperbolic assumptions. Amid all the hype and the needless controversies
centred on Salman Rushdie’s threatened presence last year and Ashis Nandy’s
off-the-cuff wisdom this year, there is a paradox that India needs to address.
There has been an explosion of literary festivals that amount to a celebration
of reading. At the same time, there has been no corresponding growth in either
the sale of books or the reading habit.
Yes, there has been an exponential growth in the
number of publishing houses setting up shop and the numbers of people convinced
that they are the next best thing after Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh—for
some odd reason, no one talks of Sir Vidia Naipaul any longer. Indeed, the
Eton-educated British MP of Ghanian origin Kwasi Kwarteng, who possesses a
wicked sense of humour, offended many literary groupies in Jaipur by suggesting
that the Indian who parachuted into a God-forsaken African country in search of
a disaster travelogue was guilty of the same presumptuousness that whites were once
charged with by angry ‘post-colonial’ audiences. Fortunately, as I discovered
in Jaipur with an enormous sense of relief and reassurance, earnest young women
mouthing platitudes in a language that is both strident and incomprehensible may
well be a thing of the past. Or, at least, the phenomenon hasn’t seriously infected
the Pink City Circus.
In a land where, at least for a disproportionate
number of English-reading people, the road to enlightenment runs through a
Chetan Bhagat novel and an MBA degree, it is easy to intimidate people into looking
for the Exit sign at the mention of literature. What used to be a pleasurable activity
involving the human experience was successfully transformed by the high priests
of ‘post-modernism’ and other lifestyle diseases into something utterly fearful
or, worse still, boring. For me, a worrying feature of literary festivals in
India was the nagging fear that the appreciation of books and writing would
degenerate into a seminar on the inadequacies of the intellectual architecture
of what we, bound up in reams of ‘false consciousness’, imagined was creative
stuff.
In what I thought was a piece of delicious irony,
the Festival organisers scheduled a discussion on Rudyard Kipling involving
three of his biographers—Charles Allen, David Gilmour and Andrew Lycett—on the
morning of Republic Day. As the moderator for the session, I had gently told
the three Britons that should speak their mind and not be concerned with how
Kipling is perceived in the corridors of political correctness. At the same
time, I was a little concerned that some prickly soul in the audience wouldn’t
find the ‘White Man’s Burden’ and the grudging tribute to the Fuzzy-Wuzzy in
the Sudan terribly funny, and respond with the “unreasonable petulance of small
children, always morbidly afraid that someone is laughing at them”—Kipling’s
amusing caricature of the Bengali.
Belying expectations, I discovered something that
restored my faith in Hindoostan: that decades of contrived anti-imperialist
propoaganda hasn’t been able to kill India’s abiding love for Kipling. Gilmour
explained the paternalist underpinnings of ‘White Man’s Burden’; Lycett read
“We and They” which could well have been written by a professional
multiculturalist; and Allen held forth on Kipling’s love affair with Buddhism
in Kim. An intervention from the audience suggested that Stalky & Co hadn’t
been bettered as boy’s boarding school tales; an IAS officer disputed that
there were few Bengalis in late-Victorian Lahore for Kipling’s Bengali allergy
to have been born of ignorance; and a woman journalist reminded everyone that
politics be damned, Kipling remained the master of children’s stories.
The Telegraph, February 1, 2013
