Creativity, dissent rule litfest Day 2

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It was only appropriate that after Friday’s drama and minor dhamakas, the Jaipur Literature Festival opened on Saturday with the soulful, and cleansing, rendition of Kabir’s songs by Shabnam Virmani.

But as soon as Virmani left the stage, Kashmir writer Siddhartha Gigoo, UK-based Bangladeshi writer Tahmima Anam, lyricist Prasoon Joshi, Tamil writer Charu Nivedita, and Cheran, a Sri Lankan writer living-in-exile in Canada, took over the mics to discuss “Creativity, Censorship and Dissent”.
It was an unwieldy discussion but all the right boxes were ticked — all panelists agreed that freedom of expression is the foundation on which robust and political dissent is based, that the space available for dissenting writers is shrinking and that every time there is a flash point over freedom of expression in the field of art and writing, the state buckles.
Nivedita, whose novel Zero Degree has serious sexual and violent content, talked about repression in Tamil Nadu, not so much by the state, but by the intelligentsia. He said that because he is considered a pornographic writer, his writings don’t appear in Tamil Nadu. They are translated in Malayalam and are popular in Kerala.
Prasoon Joshi said that he was more interested in exploring what writers and artists do in the absence of freedom and talked about China Digital Times which has created Grass-Mud Horse.
When translated in Mandarin, Grass-Mud Horse is an abuse with a Chinese political context. Grass-Mud Horse, he said, has become a mascot, a symbol of defiance. “They have created this character through which a form of satirical writing has emerged, to get around and make fun of government censorship. They have created a language which the filters cannot scan. They understand it, are writing stories, songs... a new lexicon has been formed because of censorship.”
Bollywood was duly trashed for giving provocative titles to mundane films and at the end the panel let the state off the hook and said that it’s actually the artistic community which has narrowed our imagination and our space, much more than oppressive regimes.
Talk of narrow imagination and the mind drifts to the packed tent where Chetan Bhagat was holding forth on "In search Of a Story". Bhagat had set the tone for his session by tweeting on Friday: “Those who think literature means being all serious, pl stay away from my sessions. And get a life.” I got a life.

One of the most interesting sessions on Saturday was “The Chutneyfication of English” with Rita Kothari, Gurcharan Singh, Tarun Tejpal and Ira Pandey where the class divide in India between English and non-English speakers was discussed and, of course, how and why Indians have taken over English and made it their own.
Tejpal said, “The English language is not created to carry the reality of India. English language and its virtues reflect the traits of those who created it — it’s a language of irony, understatement. It’s a language of cool. But the Indian reality is exactly the opposite. Indian reality is noisy, melodramatic, overblown. So when you want to carry India’s reality with eloquence in English, it’s a huge challenge.”
He said that to make his writing “authentic, powerful and more representative of the Indian reality”, he appropriates words and cadences of Hindi and Punjabi.
To loud clapping and cheering, Tejpal read a passage from his book, The Story of My Assassins, where a poor boy is sent to an English medium school and has to study Shakespeare and Yeats and decides to take his revenge: “Whenever anyone asked him, ‘How do you do?’ his answer would be, ‘Just like a daddu, just like a daddu.’” The rest of the passages included hysterical sentences with cuss words that defy translation.
This talk reminded me of Gulzar’s session on Friday where his brilliant poems, full of poignant Indian imagery, were assassinated, couplet by couplet, by Pawan Verma’s English translations.
Sample this first line from Gulzar’s poem on New York: “Kyun tumhare shehar mein cheention ke ghar nahin hain?...” Now try and digest Verma’s translation: “In your home, my friend, how come there is no ant?” Hinglish rocks!