Elephant in the room. Ghost of Blanco. Scarlet Pimpernel. Bad ad for Indian democracy. Attack on freedom of speech. Betrayal of secular India. Triumph for bigotry. A new beginning of a debate on tolerance. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. You have read the headlined quotes and you have to give it to Salman Rushdie. He inspires passion. He raises rhetoric to new highs.
But it?s worth considering that the attention of many of the more than 70,000 people who attended the latest edition of the DSC Jaipur Literature festival was on matters other than the Rushdie affair. Many were tracking the going-ons of Tom Stoppard, Girish Karnad, Amy Chua, Amish Tripathi, Abhijit Banerjee and so on with closer attention. It?s worth considering whether what playwright David Hare said actor Orson Welles said applies here. Describing his feeling about buildings where he was done filming, Welles said they stood like blackened teeth from which he had sucked out all the goodness.
When Rushdie last attended the festival, it was a different creature. Durbar Hall was the biggest venue at Diggi Palace then. It is now the smallest. There was no online pre-registration, no smart scanning of admit cards. The police was more noticeable in its absence than presence. But it was a sunny Jaipur January back then too. You could slide next to the table where Rushdie was enjoying a Kingfisher and eavesdrop. There would have been no chance of that happening this time even if he had managed to drop in. The crowds have grown. The gates had to be shut on them at the Oprah session. And that?s another thing: without The Satanic Verses tamasha, there would have been no guarantee of Rushdie being the most celebrated personality this time.
Tahmina Anam, author of The Good Muslim, had a really interesting take on the matter: Censorship shows the state at its most vulnerable. At a time when there is a lot of talk about the ?death of books? in the UK, censorship tells us books are powerful.
Perhaps it was time for a big controversy to hit a festival that?s managed to hit so competitive a literary map so fast. From Africa to Arabia, from the US to Sri Lanka, authors are lining up to pour in. Oprah wasn?t even on the original invitee list; but by her bathtub she has carried a vision board with a woman on a camel, saying ?Come to India? (the previous board said, ?Barack Obama President, Barack Obama President, Barack Obama President?). Ben Okri has been wanting to come for six years, the time it took for him to get over his fear of flying (which wasn?t so bad after all). And if the festival is to retain its character and grow its status, the controversies can?t be wished away any more than the crowds. Of course, one didn?t like to suffer a 20-minute wait to use the restroom. But that squabble between men and women over using it, that taking in of Sunil Khilnani and samosas simultaneously, gives the festival a character that sanitised five-star surroundings just can?t deliver.
renuka.bisht@expressindia.com