Asian Window

Namita Bhandare on the 5th Jaipur Lit Fest which ends today at Diggi Palace, Jaipur

The fifth season of the Jaipur Literature Festival is almost at an end. So many writers and so many readers packing their bags as they head back home after five days of sometimes heady, frequently thought-provoking and, yes, occasionally banal discussion.

It’s been such a long journey since the first Lit Fest, held with 17 authors in attendance at Neemrana (and, apparently, an audience of five people). This year’s Lit Fest counted 220 authors, including one Nobel Laureate (Wole Soyinka), several Bookers (Roddy Doyle), serious academics (Niall Ferguson) and an international press gathering that included legendary magazine editor Tina Brown. And, yes, the audience: an estimated 30,000 people from Jaipur, Delhi, London, Glasgow, Rome, Mumbai, New York, Kolkata.

While the crowds at Diggi Palace were cause for celebration — who would have guessed that so many people were still interested in the written word — they were also cause for consternation.

And here’s the conumdrum. The beauty of the Jaipur Lit Fest lies in the fact that it is free and open to all. There are no tickets. There are no VIP enclosures, no green rooms for star authors. The success of the Jaipur Lit Fest lies in the fact that it has been able to rope in the crowds it now gets: school children and teachers and unpublished poets wandering around armed with manuscripts and invincible in their belief that all is not lost, that there is a market for their work, that people still read and love poetry.

But for the first time since I’ve been attending the Lit Fest for the past four years, there was no scope for individual conversation. There wasn’t a quiet spot to be found as writers scurried about from one venue to another. Even small-time film stars — Rahul Bose, for instance — were mobbed by autograph seekers. Soyinka seemed irritated when people asked him to sign scraps of paper or even copies of his books. “Why isn’t it open?” he snapped at one autograph hunter who stopped him and then began fishing in his bag searching for the to-be-signed book.

Actor Om Puri (here to discuss, along with his wife Nandita Puri, his new biography, Unlikely Hero) tried to venture out of his room at Diggi Palace but couldn’t take more than a step at a time before being accosted by screaming schoolgirls for autographs and photographs. An irritated Shabana Azmi (reading from her mother, Shaukat Azmi’s memoirs) refused outright to sign any more autographs. Her husband, Javed Akhtar was somewhat more obliging.

And there were lines everywhere. For lunch, for coffee, to buy books, for entry into the venues. How do you focus on what is being said up on stage when you’re being jostled by a thousand other eager readers?

Grouse two in an otherwise excellent festival: The Lit Fest integrates off hour music sessions every year. Most of these take place outside Diggi Palace. This year, the organisers decided to stick with Diggi citing logistic nightmares as a reason for not moving out.

But Jaipur is bursting with wonderful venues. William Dalrymple’s readings from The Last Mughal at Amer Fort, under the light of the moon, a few years ago was in a word, magical. This year, Om Puri reading from Girish Karnad’s Tughlaq at Diggi didn’t have the ghost of a chance in terms of atmosphere. And who can ever forget Anushka Shankar and Karsh Kale, huddled under gas heaters as they played in a wind-swept garden on a cold winter night?

Diggi is a lovely, lovely little gem. Its hostess, Jyotika Kumari runs around in her bright traditional lhengas with her head covered, ordering more food, more rice which has run out again. Big ticket events take place in the front lawns. The Durbar Hall is packed with portaits of gods and the erstwhile rulers of Diggi (my favourite: the one of an ancestor in his youth, standing tall, slim, disdainful in his uniform), a small principality near Jaipur. Two newer venues have sprouted, the Mughal Tent and the Baithak, where smaller events and book readings take place.

But it’s not enough. Speaking for myself, by the end of the day, my head is spinning. Spinning with ideas, as much as with the crowds. I want to get the hell out. Brass bands, Rajasthani folk dancers and sundry fire eaters at Diggi are not going to provide balm to my exhausted soul.

Endless parties at the end of the day are not going to do it for me. The French hosted one. The British Council another. Festival sponsors, DS Construction (they built the Delhi-Jaipur highway) have one on the last night: a writer’s ball complete with a dress code (formal with a dash of pink). Will you be there, they ask. No, I say, I’m going back home.

What worked? Before I go on: there was no way I could have attended every session, but of those that I did, top honours go to Wole Soyinka’s readings (competently moderated by Jasbir Jain, critic at residence at the University of Rajasthan).

Soyinka’s physical presence is just so arresting, so heart-stopping that even if he hadn’t said a word he’d have still been the show-stopper. But he did, speak in a deep baritone from Death and the King’s Horseman: “Will they know you over there? Have they eyes to gauge your worth, have they the heart to love you?”

It’s hard to choose my next favourite. Somalia-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali was the wildcard draw, not even listed on the official programme. She spoke about the books that influenced her (Mills and Boon, Barbara Cartland and Nancy Drew), her teenage years as a militant Muslim in hijab, signing the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and her ultimate repudiation of Islam for being, in her words, anti-women, anti-gay and anti-dissent.

Tenzin Tsundue, the 20-something jailed and tortured Tibetan poet spoke with passion about how not a single government anywhere in the world supported the idea of a free Tibet (“I am tired fighting for the country I have never seen.”)

Asma Jehangir, Pakistani human rights activist castigated India for being smug in its strength yet failing to speak up for democracy in its own neighbourhood. India’s track record, she pointed out, was poor. It was more comfortable dealing with military dictators in Pakistan, it had failed to stand up for Myanmar and even as the Nepal king was being shown the door, chose to ignore the majority will in Nepal for democracy. To her credit, co-panelist Shyam Saran who was India’s foreign secretary at the time was forced to concede that India’s foreign policy decisions are not always right.

Just as an aside, Jehangir deserved a stand-alone session. The panel that she was a part of — excellently moderated by Siddharth Vardarajan included  Saran, writers Ali Sethi (Pakistan), Romesh Gunasekara (Sri Lanka) and Shazia Omar (Bangladesh) but did justice to no-one. Headline points were gained by everyone slamming the IPL auction that failed to pick up a single Pakistani cricketer.

By and large, big panel discussions don’t work in the Lit Fest format. Barkha Dutt tried to keep her flock from wandering too far from the subject at hand: Can the Internet save books?  But put Tina Brown, Vikram Chandra, Gulzar, Steve Coll, and Tunku Vardarajan on stage all at once for a one-hour discussion and what you get is a wooly-headed monster that dashes about all over the place.

Will I go back next year? Chances are, yes, I will. For one, I am a certified Lit Fest junkie; cannot do without my annual fix. Two, the fest is still such a wonderful creature that nothing, not the crowds, not the networkers, not the wanna-bes, not the schmoozers, can take away one iota of the sheer spell it casts again and again.

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