Celebrity editor Tina Brown declared that the Jaipur Literary Festival (JLF) was “The Greatest Literary Show on Earth!” The hyperbole could have been an attempt to indulge an emerging market. Even with low literacy rates, South Asia has a sizable English-reading population. [break]
The size of the market becomes lucrative once the English-speaking diaspora from the Subcontinent is taken into account. Lady Evans is too clever not to recognize that the future of English language publications lies with the Southasian audiences.
The people behind JLF know that amplification is an inalienable part of being in the business of arts and literature.
The quote attributed to the celebrity mediaperson of New York appears as the masthead of JLF website, energizing its past and future attendees into paying more attention to the celebration of literature than its creation.
There is a methodical similarity in the urban design of Jaipur and Lalitpur. Both cities have been laid out according to injunctions of Hindu scriptures.
It may need an expert to point out parallels, but even lay visitors can get the impression that the two royal settlements are different in look and yet so much alike in the feel of the place. Monuments in Jaipur are grander, but Patan is a lot friendlier.
Tourists throng to both places for the peculiar warmth of strangeness that emanate from their streets.
The media hype over JLF had attracted several high-profile Nepali entrepreneurs of the writing and publishing business to the royal city of Rajasthan in the past. Some of them brought the bug into Kathmandu Valley, and two identical events are planned within a month in Lalitpur.
The first one seems to be Nepali-centric while the later one promises to emphasize Nepali authors writing in English.
Like beauty contests and fashion shows, literary festivals are promotional events where authors are the main products.
The writer as a celebrity is relatively a new phenomenon in South Asia. In mature markets, new titles have to jostle for space in decreasing number and diminishing size of bookshops. Increasingly, authors have to be packaged, promoted and sold to the audience rather than their creations.
It is not so yet in Nepal where either every writer is a celebrity, or none is so. Recently, it has been seen that people pay to listen to poets read their lines.
It is difficult to determine whether such responses are in solidarity with the poet or born out of genuine admiration of their works. But tickets are sometimes sold out for public reading events of popular writers.
Controversies and celebrities often go together. Unfortunately or fortunately, most contemporary Nepali writers are everyday people.
We do have poets who struggle for a living, and writers who have to permanently carry their manuscripts in the backpack for want of publishers, but the romantic poverty of creators of yore when an essayist had to indulge in plagiarism to pay rents or a poet who composed verses to buy cigarettes are over.
Writers these days can survive as producers of text at media houses. Socialites pay decent wages to ghostwriters who can endorse the trend of the day in readable prose.
Even lifestyle choices and political views of most contemporary Nepali writers are quite conventional. The “national dress” of labeda-suruwal continues to be the epitome of fashion since Panchayat days, and denouncing Maoists has replaced decrying Kangressis as the favorite form of literary remonstration.
The Nepali literary scene is a staid world with too many Dais, Bhais, Didis, Bahinis and Daju-Bhaujyus backslapping each other for the great work everyone appears to be doing. With too many creators and too few critics, readers have been overwhelmed by the embarrassment of riches. Critics are not good for book business.
They are even less useful in reassuring patrons and sponsors without whom no high art can survive in the marketplace of propriety and respectability.
Another breed that seldom gets attention of readers is copy editors. The gatekeepers of the media and the head honchos of publishing enterprises—the editors-in-chief, the managing editors or the publishers—get the full treatment for just being what they are.
Reporters too are wooed with special attention in the hope of receiving a favorable coverage.
Few notice that neither conventional publishing nor web pages would be worth much without the work of designers. Imagine reading this column as a long text message on your cell phone: You would not have the patience to go until the end unless you considered the columnist a “brand” worthy of your attention.
The same piece, when designed with proper fonts, enticing pull quotes and captivating sketches or photographs, would probably attract readers to even a debutante columnist.
With e-readers gaining popularity, books would probably become like paintings, produced to adorn living room walls of the discerning elite. Words, however, would still be needed to convey an idea, record an experience, tell a story, or simply to express oneself without a clue as to what random sentences would do to their readers.
Like paintings then, books would be confined to connoisseurs of linguistic creations.
Are literature festivals precursors of art exhibitions where painters are the stars who consecrate a subject merely with their signatures? There may come a time when audiences would have to go to cafes to listen to an author read, just as they do now when they attend a concert for quality music, or visit a gallery to experience fine arts.
Miss Neighborhood contests have become a rage with community, age, region and locality variations. Music competitions have multiplied.
Poetry competitions and essay writing competitions would probably come out of schools and claim their rightful places at literary festivals to create a buzz in the market.
For now, however, literary events are occasions when authors meet certain kinds of socialites at reading sessions, thematic discussions and artistic debates.
A lit-fest is an industry event to identify, promote and sell products—the authors—with the help of the right kind of props and conducive atmosphere complete with quality wines.
The risk is that successful literary festivals may end up putting a few Nepali writers on the international scene much before they are ready for the glare and without the supporting cast of competent critics, designers and editors.
That is for the future. For now, it is celebration time, and hurrah for the art of Gutenberg!
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