Jaipur got a major facelift in 1953 when the then maharaja had the whole city painted in pink to welcome the Prince of Wales who had come visiting. The city has remained pink ever since. Thus, the nom de guerre: Pink City. But Jaipur now risks being known as the city of “Literature Festival,” thanks to the growing influence of the Jaipur Literature Festival.
An annual event, the Jaipur Literature Festival had a modest beginning in 2006, with 14 writers participating in it. The festival grew in subsequent years, with more and more writers participating in it. Last year, it drew 150 writers from around the world; this year, more than 200 writers, including the Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka; Booker Prize Winners Ann Enright, and Roddy Doyle; Pulitzer Prize winners Lawrence Wright, Steve Coll, and Anne Elizabeth Applebaum;Tarun Tejpal; Vikram Chandra; Amit Chaudhuri, Sobha De; Vir Sanghvi; Tina Brown; Girish Karnad; Ashok Vajpaye; K Satchidanandan; Krishan Baldev Baid; Hanif Kureishi; Ali Sethi; Roberto Callaso; Meghnad Desai; Arvind Krishna Mehrotra; Geoff Dyer; Anjum Hasan; Niall Ferguson; Chetan Bhagat; Javed Akthar; and Gulzar.
As usual, the Festival kicked off on January 21. In his keynote address, the doyen of Indian Theatre Girish Karnad took the audience on a tour of the Indian arts, explaining how it lost is caste and class characters after the arrival of the British in India. The keynote address was followed by a session on Indian poetry in which poet and translator Arvind Krishna Mehrotra read out translations of poems by writers like Arun Kolatkor. In another discussion, Ashok Vajpayee and the Harvard educated Krishna Baldev Vaid talked about diary writing as a genre in Indian writing. These were parts of the Bhasa Series discussions which were conducted to help better appreciate Indian vernacular literatures and bridge the divide between Indian literatures in English and in regional languages, which has grown deeper, particularly after the Macaulay-like statement made by Salman Rushdie in “Vintage Indian Writing in English” that Indian writers writing in English are far superior to those writing in vernacular languages.
One cannot keep politics out of things literary. Sure enough, there were quite a few discussions on politics. In a session titled “In a tough neighborhood,” the young Pakistani author Ali Sethi, Sri Lankan writer Romesh Gunasekera, Pakistani human rights activists and lawyer Ashma Jehangir, and former foreign secretary of India Shyam Sharan discussed the tension-filled relations between India and its neighbors. The panelists criticized the Indian government for not acting tough to dictatorships, and Shyam Sharan said that one should not see India’s relationship with its neighbors in black and white, but in shades of grey. The name of Nepal cropped up more than once during the discussion, but there was no panelist from Nepal, and many thought someone from Nepal should have been invited to participate in the discussion. Al Qaeda and the US were discussed. So was the rise of Muslim fundamentalism.
The organizers make sure that the festival has at least a few superstars every year, to attract more people. Last year, there were Amitabh Bachchan (who had come to release a book on him titled “Bachchanalia”) and Nandita Das (who had been asked to talk on films and social activism). This year, there were Om Puri, Shabana Azmi, Rahul Bose, and a few other celebrities.
In one session, Rahul Bose moderated a discussion on the film adaptations of novels. In another session, Om Puri criticized the publishers of his biography “Unlikely Hero”, which is written by his wife Nandita Puri, for creating propaganda by leaking out to press two pages from the book which contained the description of his sexual affairs.
Shabana Azmi read out from “Kaifi and I”, a memoir written by her mother Shaukat Azmi. Javed Akthar later joined his wife Shabana, which enlivened the discussion that followed the reading. When asked if her life was very romantic and like poetry, married as she was to a very romantic poet, Shabana said, “He [Javed] doesn’t have a single romantic bone in his body.” In reply, Javed said that one doesn’t have to be romantic in life to write romantic poetry. He asked, “A trapeze artist who flows through the air in the circus doesn’t keep swinging around his house, does he?”
There were one-hour-long sessions from 10 am to 6 pm, held in four different venues simultaneously. And the audiences were left with the difficult choice of deciding, for example, whether to listen to Anne Enright talk to Indrajit Hazra about her books, or Vikram Chandra talk to Alexander McCall Smith about detective novels.
There was a galaxy of writers talking about publishing in the next decade, the future of books in the age of the internet, on the art of literary criticism, and biography, on Queen’s English and whatnot, one session after another.
No wonder, Tina Brown, the former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, said that the Jaipur Literature Festival “is the greatest literary show on earth.”
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