Jaipur, Jan 25 (IANS) The absent Salman Rusdhie may have stolen the headlines, but the five-day Jaipur Literary Festival will be remembered for its many incandescent moments when poetry intersected with polemics, science duelled with spirituality, rationalists cohabited with mystics and the truths of art competed with lies of politics and bigots.
Billed as the ‘mahakumbh of the word,’ a metaphor for redemption and transcendence through words bred in the solitude of writers, ironically the festival ended with a capitulation to bigots who have no hunger for freedom, but subsist on a sparse diet of certitudes.
The fifth edition of the festival, which exposed an eclectic crowd of over 100,000 people to literary giants, star intellectuals and celebrity playwrights like Top Stoppard, Ben Okri, Michael Ondaatje, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, was by far the biggest since the festival started on a tentative note in 2007.
Going by the count of footfalls, 122,000 people, more than double the number last year, came to savour this feast of stories at Diggi Palace heritage hotel that has become a landmark in this Pink City.
The sheer logistics of the festival were revelatory: There were over 250 invited authors, more than 500 journalists and around 2,500 invitees who participated as delegates.
On all five days of the fest, there were five parallel sessions, with two to three authors and speakers from 10 am to 7.30 pm. And 24 corporate giants, including Tata Steel, Google and Bank of America stepped in generously to bankroll creativity. The two book stores at Diggi Palace sold books over Rs 60 lakh in five days.
‘I feel so happy here. The Indians are so open to the beauty of words,’ Argentinian writer Pola Oxoriac, told IANS. ‘It’s an absolutely unique, spectacular show. It’s amazing how literature can connect to people,’ Kamin Mohammadi, the London-based Iranian writer and journalist.
The themes chosen for discussion cut across genres and geographies, displaying a exhaustive range. ‘Debut writers and unheard voices share the sky with international stars and popular bestsellers here,’ said Namita Gokale and William Dalrymbple, noted writers and organisers of the festival.
From Africa to the Middle East, the state of the world, specially its conflict zones, figured in discussions on Kashmir and Palestine. Literature’s perennial romance with revolution and its genius for subverting the status quo came in for a critical gaze and were reflected in discussions on the Arab Spring, writing and resistance, and the democratic renaissance in Myanmar.
Rusdhie or no Rushdie, the shadow of God clearly loomed large over a secular fete of letters with the presence of celebrity atheists and sceptics like Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker and A.C. Grayling. And it wasn’t just the fundamentalists who were hustling God into this carnival of creativity.
Fittingly, the festival started with sessions on Bhakti poetry and the vision of Sikh gurus and ended with a stirring debate on ‘This House believes that Man has replaced God.’
Bigots tried to spoil the party by forcing the author of ‘The Satanic Verses to stay away and made sure that his scheduled video-link address was also scrapped , eliciting howls of outrage, but they couldn’t quite kill the creativity exuberance of the festival.
The five-day fest was interspersed with soulful devotional singing by Shabnam Virmani, the famous singer of Kabir songs and Parvati Baul.
It was also a festival where revolutionaries rubbed shoulders with prissy socialites, the swish set togged out in trendy clothes partied with panache, literary-minded Bollywood stars floated around and foreign women writers fell in love with the sari.
The festival had many lighter moments, fusing discourse and discos, as it were. The performance by Jaipur Kawa Brass Band and fire-eating dancers of Rajasthan Josh was simply bound-blowing, getting many inspired souls to shake a leg or two.
The crowds were overwhelming, but in the end, it is the commingling of crowds with creative geniuses that have made the JLF such a powerful brand, a place to be seen and heard, and justifies the much-touted moniker by Tina Brown as ‘the greatest literary show on earth.’
‘It’s an egalitarian festival, anybody who loves can come in. If this festival inspires people to buy at least two books of the writers they heard speak, I would call it a success,’ said Marina, a Delhi-based writer and blogger who has been coming to the JLF for the last few years.
(Manish Chand can be contacted at manish.c@ians.in)
