Jaipur festival was a hit with exiles

By Anjan Roy

Now that the Jaipur Literary Festival has come to an apparently ignominous end, one can still take a look back with cold reason. If Salman Rushdie opted to stay away from the Jaipur Literary Festival, his presence proved to be all pervading. Speaker after speaker, during the Festival’s deliberations referred to the Rushdie affair – both the decision not to come, cancellation of even a video conference, rushed exit of writers who read from his work in protest as well as the opposition to his participation.

He had become a reference point for this year’s JLF. Whoever wanted to stop him from coming, has failed to achieve the objectives. At the same time, the entire chain of events has seriously undermined the image of the Indian state’s ability to stand up to opponents of free speech, as many of the speakers stridently pointed out. Take for instance the session “In Defence of Enlightenment”. Well-known academician and authors A.C. Grayling and Steven Pinker regretted the absence of Rushdie and related the modern event to the historical developments following the Enlightenment in Europe. Enlightenment was the advent of rationalism, the rise of science and efflorescence of humanism. Right to free speech, the questioning spirit which refuses to accept established truth were the contributions of the movement. The authors drew these concepts in their present day context. As one of them concluded: “I admire the man who is seeking truth, I hate one who says he has found it”. In the session “After bin Laden”, Rushdie walked into the deliberations as much. The upshot of all this was a book two decades old, has, as if, been resurrected from oblivion. Its sales have resumed, if for nothing else for curiosity’s sake.

But these apart, JLF today has evolved as a thriving and pulsating gathering where the archetypal intellectual is finding a platform to talk, meet and maybe enjoy each other’s company. What a surcharged atmosphere, JLF has been able to create. The world seems to have congregated to Jaipur in the midst of its sunny winter days in the salubrious grand old Diggi Palace gardens. People came for the charm of Jaipur as much for its intellectual discourse. The literary festival has become the quintessential age-old mela of India, with the difference that the wares offered are cerebral rather than material.

Here in the midst of the mela, a maha kumbh if you like, you can hear a conversation where one is talking about his last book and another aspiring intellectual is trying to cosy up to a published author. While there was a raging controversy around it, on the mela ground itself JLF transcended all boundaries. This year’s literary festival had really become a festival of the Muslim writers – from all over the Arab world. It had aspects of a festival of writers in exile.

One of the most successful sessions last Sunday proved to be one on “Wars, Revolutions and Writer as Exile”. Fatima Bhutto described her life as an exile when her father had to leave Pakistan and the family migrated to Lebanon. She grew up feeling a Lebanese, much to her father’s disapproval, until she came back to Pakistan as a child. Her school days in Karachi were those of an alien into a strange land. The irony of it was that when her father came back home, it was exile for her from Lebanon, as she explained.

Iranian author Kamin Mohammadi related her experience of leaving Iran in the wake of the Shah and adjusting to her adopted country of Britain. She grew up in London and attempted to become an English girl, which however much she tried could not be achieved. Her homecoming to a loving extended family of uncles, aunts and cousins brought her back to her roots.

It was however not so with the Arab writer, Hanan al-Shaikh. She left her home country when Lebanon was getting engulfed in internal strife over religious identity. A pluralistic society, Lebanon was riven apart by sectarianism and killings fro which she chose to run away. She left for Britain and started writing to take her revenge over the violence and wanton killings in her home country. Settled in London, she continued to write in Arabic. But it was a different idiom in which she was writing in the midst of an English environment where all around her was the English language, customs and ways. The exile lived, as they said, in a third level – the exile has the home country, the adopted country and the one where he or she wants to be in his or her imagination.

Whichever country they came from, these writers from afar had adored India with all its shortcomings, for the political freedom – despite exigencies of elections. Here in Jaipur one could witness the crop post harvest of the Arab Spring.

Jaipur has successfully bridged the spatio-temporal gap for these writers, the intellectuals, thinkers who could strike a chord to express their diverse feelings. Maybe, that is why the JLF is ticking and emerging as the boundary-less meeting ground. (IPA Service)