There’s nothing quite like it in the world
View(s):From a holler of approval from a crowd of 245,000 for
former Indian President, Abdul Kalam, screams of excitement for Bollywood star Sonam Kapoor to a sound of silence for controversial literary giant, V.S Naipaul, Smriti Daniel
captures the scene at the 2015 Zee Jaipur Literary Festival
From the press terrace adjacent to the front lawns at Diggi Palace, the roar of the crowd drifting up is a sign that a speaker has found particular favour. Baking in the winter sun, the sprawling venue consists of a series of marquees and rooms, all heavily branded by corporations ranging from Google to British Airways and Ford. In between, coffee-wallahs serve up steaming beverage in clay cups, samosas are fried by the hundreds, several stalls do brisk, if incidental, business in clothing and crafts, and the Amazon India stall makes a tidy profit – moving some 10,000,000 books in less than a week.
One of the best attended sessions: Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul (left) in conversation with British playwright Farrukh Dhondy
By the time weekend arrives the place is bursting at the seams, thousands upon thousands of people (245,000 in all) setting the metal scanners beeping hysterically at security as they stream past the brilliantly colourful entry and into the literary heaven that lies beyond. Some are readers, but many are just here for the spectacle – the latter inspiring much ire and muttering among the former. Give up hope all ye who enter here of seeing everything – 300 authors, across 209 sessions across 10 venues across five days, all for free. It is an overwhelming event that is uniquely Indian in every way, a reflection of the assault the country itself launches on your senses.
This year the festival launched a thousand headlines as international media gathered in the building allocated to them – in one room a series of screens and headphones offered live feeds from as many as six parallel venues while journalists sat typing furiously on a line of computers, submitting their day’s copy. On the terrace, where authors arrived fresh from their sessions, footage is shot, photographs taken and conversations recorded. It is an intense, exhausting experience – and looking out over a sea of heads you know there’s nothing quite like it in the world.
But it’s out there, in the thick of the heaving, jostling crowd that lies the pulsing heart of the festival. They holler their approval of the inspiration India’s 11th President, A.P.J Abdul Kalam doles out, they scream and scramble for a view of Bollywood film star Sonam Kapoor as she launches a book on the industry and they hoot with laughter when bestselling author Chetan Bhagat cracks another joke, but they are largely silent for V.S Naipaul.
Naipaul’s last public appearance?
The silence stretches as Naipaul appears to lose his chain of thought, not for the first time. The session ‘The Writer and The World’ featuring the Nobel laureate and his old intimate, the British playwright Farrukh Dhondy is underway on the Front Lawns of the Diggi Palace. In the days
Popular with the crowd: Bollywood film star Sonam Kapoor (right) launches a book on the industry. At left is Anupama Chopra
leading up to the Zee Jaipur Literary Festival, rumour had it that the 82-year-old author, who has Parkinson’s disease, would cancel his appearance. Yet here he is.
The audience is unusually patient and still – over 5,000 people will the author to speak, seemingly aware that they are witnessing what is likely to be his last public appearance. Needing to pause frequently, Naipaul keeps his comments brief, yet reflective. At one point he speaks of his response to early rejections of his work: “I suppose what I’m trying to say is I had a great faith in myself and my talent and I felt too that if I wasn’t true to my talent and I wasn’t true to myself that would be the end of me as a person. What I did, I kept on writing, in spite of all the drawbacks and the lack of encouragement.”
Filled to overflowing, the space is dense with people, ensuring this session will go down as one of the best attended in a year where Zee Jaipur Literary Festival broke its own records. Sitting behind Naipaul’s wheelchair is ‘Lady Naipaul,’ née Nadira Khannum Alvi, the Pakistani journalist. Over the course of the next hour, she will take notes, murmur lines in her husband’s ears and will tenderly put her arm around him so that she can hold the mike to his lips when he tires.
Dhondy and the two Naipauls make an odd tableau, and at this session no one is talking about the allegations of the shocking abuse the author visited on his previous wife and mistress (which his biographer Patrick French revealed with Naipaul’s consent). Instead the personal life of the ‘least liked man in literature’ is set aside as Naipaul revisits the early years of his career, his writings on Trinidad, and of most interest to this audience, the three controversial books he wrote on India –‘An Area of Darkness’ (1964), ‘India: A Wounded Civilisation’ (1977) and ‘India: A Million Mutinies Now’ (1990).
Naipaul explains tremulously that the title ‘An Area of Darkness’ was not a reference to India but to a place that had been such a presence in his life, which he knew nothing about. Naipaul said he was bewildered by the uproar that greeted the book. “It was written with a desire to be true to the visual facts. I learned to live with it,” he told Dhondy. His wife chipped in here, to add that Naipaul’s mother, who only knew one word in Hindi, that for son, had said to him: “Beta, leave India to the Indians.” At the end, when Naipaul breaks down and weeps with gratitude at his reception, his wife wipes his tears, smearing them across his cheeks with the palms of her hand.
Conversations about Sri Lanka
We meet co-founder of JLF and noted author William Dalrymple later that evening. ‘Dalo’ as the local press dub him, sports a neat French beard, liberally speckled with grey. Even in the middle of what must be chaos, he looks satisfied – for him one of the most memorable moments of this festival came when noted travel writer Paul Theroux and Naipaul met on stage. Once dearest of friends, the two men had become embroiled in an increasingly bitter feud which lasted well over a decade. That they had chosen to bury the hatchet in public on a JLF stage is something Dalrymple is entitled to feel smug about.
Our conversation quickly turns to Sri Lanka – the author is no stranger to the island. In fact he wrote the first chapter of his wonderful book ‘Nine Lives: in Search of the Sacred in Modern India’ (2009) sitting in Geoffrey Dobbs’ home Taprobane. Even before, his book ‘Age of Kali’ (1998) had him on the island in time to witness the withdrawal of the Indian Peace Keeping Force, meet with Anton Balasingham, when he was still the chief negotiator for the LTTE, and be one of the few outsiders allowed to tour a guerrilla camp and speak with female cadres. He has since returned twice to Colombo to speak at the Galle Literary Festival. He remembers the latter with pleasure, but voices reservations.
Huge audience: Literally a sea of heads
“Sri Lanka, like India, has been a country whose indigenous literature has been colonised and supressed,” he tells the Sunday Times. “It seems to me the only way to run a festival in South Asia, while pulling in big international stars, is to accommodate local languages and local literatures of all stripes, which means Tamil, which means Sinhalese and my impression was that there was less of those than there could have been.”
It wasn’t the only mention of Sri Lanka at the festival, with a special session dedicated to ‘Sri Lanka Through The Looking Glass’ bringing together the unlikely duo of Romesh Gunasekera (who was shortlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2015 but lost out at the festival to Jhumpa Lahiri) and journalist Samanth Subramaniam in conversation with Ashok Ferrey. Ferrey praised the latter’s ‘This Divided Island’ as “one of the most honest accounts of the war, post-war, pre-war, that I have read.”
Heavy rains which induced misery in festival-goers already a little beset by cold, forced organisers to scramble on Day 2 as they relocated sessions and shortened others to compensate – this one being one of the unfortunate victims. The session concluded with Ferrey asking of his panellists how their books would have changed should they have been written post the election that won Maithripala Sirisena the presidency?
Acknowledging that his book was bleak, Subramaniam said, “I don’t think the bleakness has fully dissipated…there is the fear or the caution at least that this president is a slightly ameliorated version of Mahinda Rajapaksa. And we don’t know yet what he has got planned for the country.” Gunasekera added, “I think the most gratifying thing about it is that something that seemed inconceivable did happen. Presumably, the people who are having a really bad time are the astrologers, including the one that advised Rajapaksa to go for this election.”
| A constellation of literary stars This is not a festival that lends itself to short summaries, so here for your entertainment, a series of five excerpts from some particularly interesting sessions: 1. “Go away, Dim Dim!”Paul Theroux is in trouble. A trio of natives from the Trobriand Islands have three rusty spears pointed at him. He is in a kayak, which having come stuck on a mud bank is going nowhere at all. The islanders suggest that the foreigner, a.k.a Dim Dim, “run for his life.” Theroux is afraid not that he will be stabbed to death but that a scratch will turn septic. “Don’t be silly,” he tells them, but nevertheless, paddles vigorously and escapes. While describing to his interviewer Monisha Rajesh some of the most frightening of his experiences he says: “The most vivid experiences I have had is of a very young person pointing a very old gun in my face, it’s happened several times.” She comes back with a question usually reserved for women – does he not feel responsibility to his children at home to not put himself at risk? He replies candidly: “Yes, that’s a passing thought, but after it happens you think, now I’ve got something to write about.” Catton, a fan of detective fiction wrote a story that follows Edinburgh-born Walter Moody as he tries to make his fortune during the gold rush on the west coast of New Zealand’s South Island in 1866. Catton used charts from Sky & Telescope and a software programme called Stellarium to plot the stars and planets during the course of when the narrative takes place, with characters linked to the heavenly bodies. Consequently, 12 “stellar” characters, corresponding to the Zodiac signs and seven “planetary” characters are all grounded by the “earth” character, Crosbie Wells, the murdered man whom the mystery revolves around. Catton wanted to write a genuinely readable experimental novel, but joked that her 832 page doorstopper felt like “a failed experiment right up to the end when it finally worked.” Unfortunately, she’s likely to remember JLF for an interview in Live Mint where she criticised her government that has since sparked controversy. 3. Writer, playwright, screenwriter, actor and movie director Girish Karnad joined veteran actor Naseeruddin Shah to talk about the publication of the latter’s memoir ‘And Then One Day.’ “The problem with writing your memoirs, those who are not included in it get upset, those who are included get it more upset,” observed Karnad. The two men enjoy a camaraderie that has its roots in their long association. Revealing that his lack of conventional good looks both lost him his first girlfriend and won him his first movie role, Nasseruddin meditated on how his lack of immediate success in films allowed him to pursue theatre which was the greater of his two loves. Karnad shared his own anecdotes, at one point talking about how he found himself unable to act the part of a loving husband to actress Shabana Azmi. While she looked on from the audience, he said “I was a completely untrained actor. There was a scene between Shabana and me, we were supposed to talk and we were supposed to be all affectionate to each other, but I was all dry.” However, the actress managed to put Karnad at ease when she “put her left foot on my right foot and gently rubbed it, outside the camera. And that did it, suddenly I felt we were a married couple.” Amid much laughter, Naseerudin said:“I wish I’d known this in 1970.” 4. Sarah Waters, a three-time Man Booker Prize nominee and likely to become a four-time one with her wonderful novel ‘The Paying Guests’ spoke of her experiences writing historical fiction. Novels such as ‘Tipping the Velvet’ and ‘Fingersmith’ which were adapted by the BBC are famous for the lesbian love stories at their heart, but even more so for their incredible attention to authentic detail, which the author ensures is immersive rather than intrusive. “I want readers to read my book like entering a world,” she told a full house. The Welsh author who set her latest novel in the 1920s says the period fascinated her as one of transition, filled as it was with conflicts around class and gender. Inspired by the Bywaters Murder case, she reimagined what it would have meant to have two lesbians for her main characters in a traditional love triangle. “Every historical novel rewrites the past, along the lines of the present,” she said, “because we are continually inventing the past in our own image. I know very well that the preoccupations of my era…” 5. Picked by a talent scout to be of the face of Madam Mao’s Shanghai film studio, Anchee Min regaled the crowd at JLF with stories of how she once worked in propaganda films, and how after the death of Chairman Mao, she found herself a target of his many adversaries. By the skin of her teeth, she managed to get to the US, even fooling her visa officer who didn’t realise that she barely spoke English. Her memoirs ‘Red Azalea’ and ‘The Cooked Seed’ are now international bestsellers that expose truths about the China that many would prefer to forget. “The Cultural Revolution was a vehicle that brought the worst out of humanity,” she told the audience. Min ended her session most memorably by breaking out into Chinese opera, her voice floating over the large crowd on the Front Lawns. Enthusiastic applause erupted as she finished with a deep bow. |