The Jaipur Literature Festival this last week was a delightful event, relaxed and friendly, where interested individuals came to share their love for the written word, where there were no exalted out-of-reach pedestals upon which were placed some fragile individuals, but instead, an easy mingling of all, authors and their readers listening to talks and readings?till dramatically one day at noon, a young woman was whisked into the main auditorium to ?interact? with William Dalrymple, and tell her 25-year long ?story?!
Suddenly, all the television channels, uninterested thus far in this festival of the mind, of literature, of translations of writings in diverse languages of our land, of people who in fact contribute to the intellectual capital of the world, made their rather brash and superficial presence felt with their pushing and shoving, their careless loud speaking, their cellphone ringing, and their endless wires and cumbersome equipment, all coming together to shatter the hitherto unusually calm and dignified ambience, as they desperately reached for the most superficial of stories: the Life and Times of Fatima Bhutto!
What was her claim to fame? Had she published her personal diary, the Diary of Fatima Bhutto? Was she there as an aspiring journalist wanting to interview some of India and the world?s writers for newspapers in her country? None of that. She had come to ?interact?! Inanities such as ?I don?t believe in dynastic politics?, and ?my father wanted me to be the literary Bhutto? triggered the dialogue. The conversation rambled on, trying to encompass her life and that of her father?s short-lived political career, a Bhutto brother wanting to compete with his sister for dynastic power. It was all too contrived and contradictory. She said nothing new or of consequence. I could not comprehend the purpose of this session at a literary festival since there was no body of work that one could credit the lady with, except the reality of her birth. She had been born a Bhutto. Zulfikar Ali was her grandfather, Murtaza Bhutto her father. That she disliked the ?politics? of her recently assassinated aunt, and was the first Bhutto visiting India following the brutal and unnecessary murder of Benazir. Of-course, like all inheritors, she abhorred dynasties and their out-of-turn projection in the public space! Quite the theatre of the absurd!
Her performance on stage was much like a rendering from a play for a final exam at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. There was that carefully crafted pause, the gentle sigh when speaking of tragedy, the mild, condescending smile, the skirting around serious issues that plague our region, and her sad inability to come across the footlights as an impassioned young woman, raring to break new ground and represent her generation in her country. This intrusion was an aberration, but it did get the press corps to the venue of the festival, as they raced along the highway on the tail of young Bhutto in their eternal quest for a non-story. Then, having executed her performance, the aspiring-to-be-literary Bhutto, instead of meeting and engaging with some of the greats of the literary world present, disappeared, as did the TV channel-wallahs.
This said, the Literature Festival 2008, before and after, was hugely satisfying, having begun with the celebration of Translating Bharat, an important thematic, where the need to include regional language writers and their concerns, aspirations and realities, as well as their interventions in a changing and vibrant India, are as essential to Indian literature as is Indian writing in English. This was followed by the interaction between writers from overseas and their Indian counterparts. Ranging from Ian McEwan and Miranda Seymour to Kamila Shamsie, Moni Mohsin, Manil Suri, Kunal Basu, Arjun Deo Charan, Nayantara Sahgal and many others, there were readings and interactive sessions. Three cheers to Namita Gokhale, William Dalrymple and Sanjoy Roy for creating this wonderful world of words that lets writers share their diversity of ideas with the larger public.