Literary Kumbh

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Even before the curtain rose on the 6th edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF), its watchers had a moment of déja vu. The ghost of Salman Rushdie, who couldn’t show up last year, began to haunt the festival all over again.
“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that’s what,” writes Rushdie in The Satanic Verses.

Rushdie’s haters, members of a radical Muslim fringe, woke up to the fact that they had some “unfinished business” to settle and began demanding that the authors who had read out from The Satanic Verses at the festival last year — Jeet Thayil, Ruchir Joshi, Hari Kunzru and Amitava Kumar — be banned from the festival. What’s more, a handful of right-wingers wanted Pakistani writers to stay away from the festival as the bilateral ties simmered in the wake of the killings of two Indian soldiers at the LOC in the first week of January. As if all this wasn’t enough, Ashis Nandy fired a salvo by calling Dalits and OBCs to be the most “corrupt”. The JLF 2013, in short, battled the din of controversies that drowned out literature for the second year in a row.

The turn of events at the JLF has dismayed bibliophiles and the literati who feel that the needless controversies reduce what should be a celebration of literature to a slugfest.
Mita Kapur, who runs Siyahi, a literary agency based in Jaipur, and is the moving spirit behind the Mountain Echoes literary festival in Bhutan, rues the loss of the festival’s “focus” as these controversies rage on. “The festival is about books and voices that need to be heard,” she says.
The festival’s focus is not the only casualty. The controversies, and to a large extent commerce, have also dented its initial spirit. GSP Rao, who runs an online literary journal Muse India and is the organiser of the Hyderabad Literary Festival, feels that the spirit of a cohesive group of writers — meeting, sharing, discussing — has been overtaken by commercial aspects. “Everyone seems to try to exploit the global attention on the festival,” says Rao.
Many view the JLF as a “business model”. Described as the literary Kumbh, it packs 175 sessions in five days, addressed by over 275 speakers from across the globe. The footfall was nearly 2,00,000 this year. This time round, however, as the controversies mired the festival, a few of its sponsors pulled out from the event, causing approximately `1.5 crore shortfall in the budget.
While some say that many times such controversies are “stage-managed” to grab the eyeballs, others warn organisers of the JLF to tread cautiously. “The organisers should be wary of publicity-seekers who make statements just to provoke and grab attention, using litfests as a platform,” says author Vikram Sampath, one of the architects of Bangalore Literature Festival. He, however, argues that since literature mirrors society, the controversies are symbolic of our “fractured society,” with “hyper-sensitivities ruling the national discourse” on any matter, bound to spill over in a conclave like the JLF.
Rao finds fault with the festival’s size. Several writers who attended the Hyderabad Literary Festival told him they would rather prefer festivals of a modest size over Jaipur, as the former provide more “interaction”.
Some others argue that the JLF has lost its “intimacy” as it’s getting bigger and bigger, finding itself in equally “big” controversies. No longer are there any quiet moments with readers and writers. It has become so big, it has lost its “soul” .
For many others, however, it’s not an issue. Chiki Sarkar, who heads Penguin Books India, feels that the JLF is “far too interesting” and “just too much fun” to be relegated to a slugfest. “You would find that most audiences, like me, continued to enjoy their time there as much as they ever have,” she says. Sarkar says that she found the actual events “much more interesting” and the controversy, in contrast, a sideshow.
In years to come, the JLF has to ensure that literature doesn’t become a sideshow, controversies or no controversies.