India's literary fests — celebrating the magic of words

“Like pilgrims to Gangotri, the public flocks to these festivals from far and wide,” said Farrukh Dhondy of literature fests. The author and screenplay writer based in London, in the editorial for a national daily dated November 24 added: “The devotees are many but, as in the shrines to which they flock, the gods are select and few. They occupy their podiums under different names. But in the end, as with the religious festivals, all the names merge into one, the name of the Supreme Being (SB)

“As with the different ceremonials of the feasts, so also at the litfests the SBs are called upon to deliver their wisdom in several argumentative and discursive avatars. But in the end the message is one: buy my book! (or maybe two: Give me one of those literary prizes which have become as common as laddoos at Diwali).”

At the Jaipur Literature festival this year, Nobel laureate and author recluse, JM Coetzee showed up. That was a big deal. An even bigger deal was that he took to the podium and read out, for 45 minutes, his short story, The Old Woman And The Cat.

William Dalrymple, responsible as he is for the international list of authors, calls the Coetzee session a definite literary game changer of 2011. Acknowledging the “incredible mushrooming of lit fests”, Dalrymple says, “We still seem to be remaining quite qualitatively different. No one else is bringing writers from Palestine, Burma, China...”

The diversity was evident even last year. Personalities in attendance were: Atiq Rahimi, Candace Bushnell, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Irvine Welsh, Javed Akhtar, Jay McInerney, Jon Lee Anderson, Kamilla Shamsie, Kiran Desai, Martin Amis, Orhan Pamuk, Mohsin Hamid, Mrinal Pande, Sheldon Pollock and Vikram Seth.

For fantasy novelist Samit Basu, the game-changer this year has been “the rise of non-fiction, and the emergence of Siddhartha Mukherjee (Pulitzer winner for The Emperor of All Maladies) and Sonia Faleiro (Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars) as the new face of Ind-lit across the world”. (Basu doesn’t have a view on lit-fests in general, “as the ones that happen aren’t connected by anything other than the nature of the event”. But he says, “Jaipur is great fun because of good foreign writers they draw every year; it’s a pleasure to hear some of them speak.”)

Somnath Batabyal, Post Doctoral Fellow at the University of Heidelberg, conducted 'The Suitable Boy' session with Vikram Seth last year and their conversation was about Seth’s passion for other creative mediums: sculpting, poetry, music. “There has been a recent critique that Jaipur Lit Fest is the place to be seen and all of Delhi’s society treats it as a coffee shop. If that be the case, why do I not find space to sit during the events unless I reach an hour before?” He says, “The more the merrier. Get the reading public out, make them meet the authors they like or despise, get a discourse going”.

There is all round praise for William Dalrymple and Namita Gokhale who, as Batabyal says, “have been careful in selecting their authors; there is a fundamental concern over regional languages and their inclusion and an attempt to go beyond English. I have met some of my favourite Malyali and Bengali writers here.”

That said, he’s sceptical about the term game-changer. “I don’t know if I can call 2011 or anything in the year a game-changer moment. Rather what we have seen is a consolidation of what has been happening in the past few years. That is the hope that we have enough of a reading-writing public that in time will be able to sustain writers without looking at a west for confirmation.”

There is a downside and we are just at the beginning. “Books, and I mean English books,” says Batabyal, “hardly sell significantly. A 10,000 copy sell is considered a runaway bestseller... Still, there is now hope that in years to come, we might pull this off.

“The arrival of literary agents in the Indian horizon is a big thing. Writers can be writers and not worry about legalities and payments and they get better represented with better deals.”

But it has also been a year of worry. “The global slowdown,” says Batabyal “has diminished author advances in the West. Will India manage to sustain its writers and publishers or will this be a momentary surge before a lull happens? 2012 is important and will be something to watch out for”.