You entered Diggi Palace and the peacock-coloured drapes on this side, that side promised something wonderful. You weren?t disappointed. The delegates, the conversations, the books, the rich currency of ideas fluttered around like magic. You ran hither to catch some, while thither flew those that others caught. You couldn?t be in two places at once, and there were as many as five sessions taking place simultaneously. But whether you were in the Durbar Hall or the Mughal Tent, at the Baithak or on the Front Lawns, a little bit of nirvana unassumingly entered your being.
The session on creativity, censorship and dissent was somehow appropriately sponsored by Google. Given what appeared to have become the major preoccupation of the Jaipur Literature Festival commentators by now, given how much had already been written and said about the Rushdie matter, one was unprepared for hearing something really fresh. But it happened. Charu Nivedita, whose 1998 novel Zero Degree has become somewhat of a byword in transgressive Tamil literature, said there is no question of censorship and dissent in Tamil Nadu! Because Tamil literature just doesn?t get an audience until it gets translated into Malayalam or English. Keeping him company in offering an interesting exception to what had declined into humdrum commentary was Tahmima Anam, who asked that at a time when the book industry was in decline in many countries, couldn?t we take this comfort in censorship that it tells us that books are still powerful?
At the session on Gandhi, Ambedkar and the crossroads at Jantar Mantar, Joseph Lelyveld argued that the fundamental differences between the two men came from the fact that Ambedkar had one cause?to fight back caste oppression?while Gandhi was trying to balance many causes. S Anand said that Ambedkar didn?t have to be thrown off a train in South Africa to know humiliation. He had been drinking water from segregated sources since childhood, he had to fake a Parsi identity to get rooms to rent even after returning with a Columbia University degree. But Aruna Roy acted the mediator, admitting that both were childhood heroes and she just couldn?t chose one over the other. Both had ideological tethering, which was lacking in Anna
Hazare?s anti-corruption campaign. She quoted a poor person: Na hamne rishwat diya, na hamne rishwat liya. To hum kyun karenge Jantar Mantar prayashchit?
The session on the power of myth was effervescently anchored by Gurcharan Das, who made a persuasive case for the audience to watch the six-part Joseph Campbell-Bill Moyers documentary on the matter. Myths are stories that help us cope with life from birth and death, he said. Some become a part of religion. He had given all panelists homework the previous night: tell us a myth that tells something about yourself and your society. Arshia Sattar, who has published translations of Kathasaritsagara and Valmiki?s Ramayana, reminded us about how upon running into Hanuman, all that the Ramayana characters say is, ?What wonderful Sanskrit he speaks?? Nothing about how this monkey could fly or why he should be able to speak Sanskrit at all. Such is the suspension of disbelief, where a myth is a lie that tells the truth. Jawhar Sircar, author of The Construction of the Hindu. Identity in
Medieval Western Bengal: The Role of Popular Cults, was more trenchant: Myths are a pack of lies to which we agree, an extended Magna Carta under which we agree to come together. Then it was the turn of today?s
literary pop star Amish Tripathi, author of the best-selling Shiva trilogy, to take the mike. And somehow it wasn?t surprising that Amish chose the occasion to underline the divide between the arrogance of knowledge and the devotion of the heart, going on to ingeniously use this to rebut the charge that Indians are becoming too consumerist. No, we now value a sense of balance,
Amish said. The ?regrettable hypocrisy? of the first 40 years after Independence led us to treat the
invasions of Afghanistan and Cuba completely differently. Enough of that. Enough of venerating Bhishma Pitamah. We are now trying to balance sensual pleasure and religion, consumerism and savings.
The power-packed session on Poor Economics had sparks flying over whether India needs more Amuls than Tatas or Godrejs to serve the cause of its disadvantaged. Why are the pineapples of India?s Northeast so ill-branded while the oranges of Miami are so well-branded? But given a structure where millions of farmers would only boast a few pineapple trees each, how would US-style farming work in India? Would corporates go from village to village gathering pineapples? Or would a cooperative model which invested in innovations in quality, training and collection, where the producers themselves form a network of capitalist owners, serve the cause of poverty-alleviation
better? The panelists could only agree to disagree. They didn?t fail to address the elephant in the room either. Amy Chua, lately more known for her Tiger Mom avatar (raising Chinese children without proms or dates, insisting that they are capable of much more than they think), reminded us of her previous work on the tensions between free market and democracy, which even the American founding
fathers recognised, which meant that the suffragettes didn?t get a warm welcome at all.
This is her Morrison favourite, Oprah said as the Front Lawn burst at the seams, as the crowds behind the closed gates inexhaustibly chanted her name. Why this 1970 novel, Morrison?s first? When she put it on the reading list for her enormously influential book club, Oprah thought the novel was ?really about black girls not living themselves?. And then she was inundated with mail from Indian women with darker skin, Mexican women, Chinese women?all saying ?I know that story, that is my story.? To Oprah, who has had 40-year-olds tell her that they hadn?t read a book since high school, it is unimaginable to not read books. That?s what she does for pleasure, to relax and raise herself. In a week in which the Indian PMO went on Twitter, she was saying she spends a lot of time on Twitter but regrets this. She could be reading a book instead. She also promised that Barack Obama?s next four years are going to be better. There, the Oracle has spoken. Mitt Romney might as well turn in his chips. Have people forgotten that the US was on the brink of depression and that breadlines were threatening the horizon?
She also sent out apologies to James Frey, whose autobiography
A Million Little Pieces was first plugged by Oprah?s book club and then unceremoniously unplugged when it turned out that Frey had made up some of the parts. ?I thought when I looked at it again, years later, that I had more compassion for murderers and that I was defending my territory, defending my name and defending my brand of the Book Club… I mean he just told some stories that were not true, and I treated him like he had murdered someone so I apologise
for that.? Amen to getting off the
high horse.
Ok so one reads but what if that
doesn?t do any good at exam time? After finding out that Anupam Kher had failed his Class X board, his father took him away from school for a day. After an unusual treat of mutton samosa, pineapple pastries and ice-cream at an upscale restaurant, the bombshell was dropped on Kher. What explained the celebration? ?I am celebrating your failure so that in your life if you ever fail, you don?t
have to worry about the failure.? This was the best gift an ordinary father could give his child, Kher said. An
extraordinary father, my neighbour disagreed. And a bunch of youngsters applauded enthusiastically. Did they also get 38% in college?
?In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.? This is the sonorous and inviting opening of Ben Okri?s 1991 novel, which is both a Booker-winner and a modern classic. Okri of course had the audience eating out of his hand. Oprah had talked about the ?work of reading?, when you have to reread sentences, go over them again and again, go back to the beginning. Okri said people should be ?taught? to read like this. He talked
of reading poetry. It?s like air and
sunlight. It doesn?t have to look miraculous, just be miraculous. He read out his poem, ?The World Is Rich?:
They tell me that
the world is rich
with terror
I say
the world is rich
with love unfound
It?s inside us
and all around
Terror is there
no doubt
violence, hunger, and drought
Rivers
that no longer flow
to the sea
It?s the shadow
of humanity
There?s terror in the air
and we have put it there
We have made
God into
an enemy
have made
God into
a weapon
of poverty
of blindness
an army
But the world is rich
with great love
unfound
Even in the terror
there is love
twisted round and round
Set it free
River, flow
to the sea
One must stop here because one must stop somewhere. We wrap up with the session on adaptations so competently chaired by Girish Karnad, author of magnificent plays like Yayati which have lifted many an Indian stage to sublime heights, director of the 1984 film Utsav. Lionel Shriver said the great thing about writing is that it is cheap. It?s free. But not film. Vishal Bhardwaj, acclaimed for adapting Othello and Macbeth, picked up this strand. Because mass perception is that literature is boring, you have to be a con man to sell literary adaptations to a money man. For closing lines, we offer you some from the the Tom Stoppard play that enriches many an Indian University literature syllabus: ?We?re more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can?t give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They?re all blood, you see.?