Theres nothing in a literature festival more literarily stimulating than the carnival atmosphere. Plenty of words,wordplay,a couple of Nobel laureates but without the sense of magnitude and detail crowds,durbars,tents,tented lawns,tainted halls and painted faces how would the global zeitgeist be captured even by the convergence of so much literary genius on a historic locale for colour,continuity and mock controversy? Are these writers on holiday,or writers at work?
A fitting question when every step you take can be crisscrossed by J M Coetzee walking to and from venues,with his sensitive look and sharp,detached eyes,dodging anybody remotely resembling a journalist. You may be tempted to sneakily click a snap,knowing thats as far as you will get to this high priest who very,very rarely sits for an interview. And Martin Amis,never shy of a chat,is not talking after an incident on Day 1 as the excuse goes.
But Day 2 at the Jaipur Literature Festival,which saw H M Naqvi get the first-ever DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for his Home Boy,brought out that essential incompleteness and turbulence in the global story of literature anxieties about the future of the book,concluding on the affirmation that the book matters and will last irrespective of its mutations.
Kiran Desai set the book in perspective in a morning session calling it the one solid thing in an age of television and Internet where fast words go over everybodys head. Desais enduring,intimate object,a hand that you can hold,should survive the anxiety in the West about the death of the book,as John Makinson,CEO of Penguin,put it. Makinson himself thinks its the opposite its time to enlarge and enfranchise new audiences.
Patrick French,deeply submerged in the India story,underscored the significance of regional writing which is close to that story. An ideal job here since its very easy to get Indians to talk. Thus you get your two,three or multiple Indias,and write them down.
A panel of David Finkle,Rory Stewart and Jon Lee Anderson debated,explained and endorsed their definitions of journalistic responsibility,verisimilitude and empathy in the war zone. Stewart,famous for his walk across Afghanistan in the winter after the 2001 invasion,recounted in The Places in Between,felt the Iraq and Afghan wars crushed abstract theorising in the West. Finkle,who found it easy to readily empathise with Iraqis,said the individual human stories built complete pictures of the people and place.
That completeness is what Wikileaks cannot provide. Its impossible to navigate and analyse and it misses context,distorting audience perception. Anderson,author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life and New Yorker staff writer,added to that the conspiracy theory gaining ground that the mainstream media takes orders from a cabal of bearded men in a cave. It was the mainstream media and embedded journalists who broke the Abu Ghraib story,as they had reported My Lai.
The key to credible non-fiction writing,the trio concluded,is a complete avoidance of assumptions. That doesnt rule out the imagination,but as Ben Mcintyre had claimed earlier in the day in a session on his book Operation Mincemeat,the minute you begin assuming,you begin losing credibility.
A theme across sessions that keeps surfacing at the literature festival this year is the conflict or tension between the West and the rest Islam,non-West,Af-Pak. If reporting the Iraq occupation was founded on this tension,what is happening to novelists not decidedly Western?
In a session whose title was chosen by Orhan Pamuk,Out of West,more questions were raised than answered. Rana Dasguptas assumption that it meant emerging from the West was recast by the Nobel Laureate as the problems of writers not entirely Western,marginalised by the fact that they dont write in English or get their works translated into English. Since the places they write about boast populations much larger than the Wests,most of our global human experience is ignored by the global literary market.
So when Pamuk writes about love,Western reviewers call it Turkish love,while Marcel Prousts remains universal love. Nigerian Chimamanda Adichi,who noted Pamuks points but refused to blame the West,had a sharp non-literary example of problems of difference,problems of a non-Westerner visiting a non-Western country she found it extremely difficult to get an Indian visa.
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