Will there ever be a
literature festival devoid of bans on books, protest groups breathing
down the neck of speakers, waiting for them to make foot in mouth
statements, or perhaps having police guards escorting the calmest of all
species such as authors?
As much as I wanted to avoid beginning this article with a question, I couldn't detach myself from the truth - the sad, sordid state of India's democratic system, a system that loves boasting its secularity on stage, while conforming to tactics of pleasing religious allies and vote banks behind closed doors.
It's been more than a week and a lot has been written about, for and against sociologist Ashish Nandy's controversial statement. Author Salman Rushdie, on the other hand, seems to be the bone of contention that everyone is scared to swallow. Come to think of it, all this drama has, if truth be told, helped literature festivals get more publicity than ever. It has in fact attracted a huge audience other than book lovers. People, who stashed themselves away from the concept of discussing books and literature, are now so intrigued that they're already planning their schedules for JLF 2014. But banning and bullying are absolutely wrong reasons that literature festivals have sadly, come to be associated with.
Certainly, literature is not just about books. It is a concept, a harmonious blend of art, culture, history, religion, language and community. And DSC Jaipur Literature Festival 2013 had a tad bit of everything for everyone. Literary cerebrations kicked off with rights activist and iconic Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi's keynote address where she said "the right to dream should be made a fundamental right". Following the opening ceremony was the sequence of sessions, each studded with powerful speakers and attentive audiences.
Jaipur Literature Festival 2013, an overview
On day 2, Sharmila Tagore sat in conversation with author Aruna Chakravarti, both carrying the legacy of their names, to discuss the latter's most recent novel on Tagore women. 'Jorasanko' traces the emancipation of women of Thakurbari through the eyes of Jnanadanandini Devi, wife of Satyendranath Tagore. The two women discussed the protagonist's journey through her growing up years, her life in Sussex, her innovations of the Brahmika style of wearing a sari, and her strength in moving out to form a nuclear family.
The same day saw author Anjum Hasan
probing into the Indian reality that affects the lives of people, a
reality that is as simple as walking on the roads of Bangalore or
perhaps, growing up in Shillong. Her interest, she said, lay in the
solitary mental and physical journeys of ordinary people. She went on to
compare a book of poems to a novel and deduced that marketing of the
book (prose or verse) makes all the difference because the thought or
imagination while writing either, is the same. Author and editor, Manu Joseph shared the panel with her and claimed that as a journalist
he had no option but to involuntarily meet so many people everyday.
Those very people contributed as an inspiration to him. His fascination
with fiction lay in the ambiguity of the text as it allowed him to have
multiple points of view of the same thing, unlike in journalism where one has to stick to the facts.
'Rogues, Reviews and Critics' saw theorist and philosopher, Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak contesting the intellectual conflict between novelists and critics with literary critic and scholar, Christopher Ricks. Tamil writer Ambai stressed on the importance of writing in one's own language in a separate session titled 'The Language of Literature' and concluded that "getting your works translated is like giving away your own baby. Even a small mistake can change the images that the writer might have had in mind while writing it", to which Malayalam author Benyamin Daniel added, "the person translating it brings their own experience and understanding to the text."
On Day 4 a brilliant session on travel writing called 'Sense of a Place' got the audience hooked. Acclaimed authors like Pico Iyer, Samanth Subramaniam, Vikas Swarup, Akash Kapur and Peter Hessler
assembled to read out from their respective books. According to
Samanth, author of 'Following Fish', "a travel reporter must include the
granular details of the place and secondly open the narrator's mind to
the reader, while Peter Hessler maintained that the destination is not
that important, the experience is. Another incredible session was that of the 'Adventures of Amir Hamza' featuring Pakistani-Canadian author and translator, Musharraf Ali Farooqi
who has taken the onus upon himself to translate the heavily
Persianised text of Amir Hamza's dastans into English. He discussed the
challenges of finding expressions equivalent to Urdu and to contemporise
the text that has been around for almost seven centuries.
Day 5 ended with a gripping discourse on demystifying the concept of women, her status and her dignity to question in 'Stree Ho Kar Sawal Karti Ho'. Lecturer Lata Sharma maintained her calm in voicing her concern for a society that "smells of colonial hangover", comparing the state of women to slaves who aren't allowed to question, while moderator Dushyant, a fiction writer and poet, questioned the radical approach of feminism, which in an attempt to be at par with men, tries to suppress them.
Between endless conversations, numerous cups of tea and amid all the hobnobbing, the only thing that stayed with us was the breadth of literary topics covered this year - that Latin American literature is more than just magic realism, that Sanskrit was itself an active language, as English is now, and that there is no ideal jurisdiction for free expression. Protests fell silent with time and breaking news digressed to other concerns. In the end, literature was all that mattered.
As much as I wanted to avoid beginning this article with a question, I couldn't detach myself from the truth - the sad, sordid state of India's democratic system, a system that loves boasting its secularity on stage, while conforming to tactics of pleasing religious allies and vote banks behind closed doors.
It's been more than a week and a lot has been written about, for and against sociologist Ashish Nandy's controversial statement. Author Salman Rushdie, on the other hand, seems to be the bone of contention that everyone is scared to swallow. Come to think of it, all this drama has, if truth be told, helped literature festivals get more publicity than ever. It has in fact attracted a huge audience other than book lovers. People, who stashed themselves away from the concept of discussing books and literature, are now so intrigued that they're already planning their schedules for JLF 2014. But banning and bullying are absolutely wrong reasons that literature festivals have sadly, come to be associated with.
Certainly, literature is not just about books. It is a concept, a harmonious blend of art, culture, history, religion, language and community. And DSC Jaipur Literature Festival 2013 had a tad bit of everything for everyone. Literary cerebrations kicked off with rights activist and iconic Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi's keynote address where she said "the right to dream should be made a fundamental right". Following the opening ceremony was the sequence of sessions, each studded with powerful speakers and attentive audiences.
Jaipur Literature Festival 2013, an overview
On day 2, Sharmila Tagore sat in conversation with author Aruna Chakravarti, both carrying the legacy of their names, to discuss the latter's most recent novel on Tagore women. 'Jorasanko' traces the emancipation of women of Thakurbari through the eyes of Jnanadanandini Devi, wife of Satyendranath Tagore. The two women discussed the protagonist's journey through her growing up years, her life in Sussex, her innovations of the Brahmika style of wearing a sari, and her strength in moving out to form a nuclear family.
|
'Rogues, Reviews and Critics' saw theorist and philosopher, Professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak contesting the intellectual conflict between novelists and critics with literary critic and scholar, Christopher Ricks. Tamil writer Ambai stressed on the importance of writing in one's own language in a separate session titled 'The Language of Literature' and concluded that "getting your works translated is like giving away your own baby. Even a small mistake can change the images that the writer might have had in mind while writing it", to which Malayalam author Benyamin Daniel added, "the person translating it brings their own experience and understanding to the text."
|
Day 5 ended with a gripping discourse on demystifying the concept of women, her status and her dignity to question in 'Stree Ho Kar Sawal Karti Ho'. Lecturer Lata Sharma maintained her calm in voicing her concern for a society that "smells of colonial hangover", comparing the state of women to slaves who aren't allowed to question, while moderator Dushyant, a fiction writer and poet, questioned the radical approach of feminism, which in an attempt to be at par with men, tries to suppress them.
Between endless conversations, numerous cups of tea and amid all the hobnobbing, the only thing that stayed with us was the breadth of literary topics covered this year - that Latin American literature is more than just magic realism, that Sanskrit was itself an active language, as English is now, and that there is no ideal jurisdiction for free expression. Protests fell silent with time and breaking news digressed to other concerns. In the end, literature was all that mattered.
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