OLD LITERARY WAR IN NEW TURF
By Garga Chatterjee
It’s January. To book-lovers and readers all over West Bengal and especially Kolkata, this signals the start of the Kolkata Book Fair – the largest annual secular public fair in India. More than two million people throng to it every year, making it the world’s largest book fair in terms of attendance. Chennai Book Fair has about one million footfall. In this measurement, the readers are central. You can put the bania at the centre and that makes the Frankfurt Book Fair the largest in terms of the number of publishers attending. The Kolkata Book Fair, like any other subcontinental fair, is as much about readings, interactions, speeches and performances, as it is about books. From little magazines to small, medium and big publishers side by side with stalls of publications from Theosophists, Osho-wallahs, Naxalites of various hues, arcane philosophical circles, environmentalists, human rights organizations, ISKCON – it is a festival of the metropolis, reflecting the public culture and ethos of Kolkata and its surrounds. Kolkata is not merely a convenient venue. Like the Durga Puja festivities, the city owns the fair and defines it. It’s not a KFC outlet that can be put anywhere to provide the same crunch. No one cares about the names of the organizers of this massive, nearly fortnight-long event.
On the morning of January 15th 2014, I went to a bookshop on Park Street to meet a friend. At the door of the shop, there were a large number of cameras and journos waiting impatiently. In true Bengal style, an even larger number of people had assembled around this crowd. I joined the outer ring of this inquisitive Kolkata crowd that was growing by the minute and threatened to take over a large path of the footpath. I gathered that Indira Congress MP from Kerala Shashi Tharoor was inside as a panelist in a festival session and this group was outside to take his pictures, ask him about ‘trial by media’ – which is a polite way to asking him about his state of mind given the ongoing Sunanda Pushkar case. If I were the festival organizer, I would be happy about the timing, though I would not say it aloud. All publicity is good publicity. Almost always. Kolkata, with its irreverent crowds can cut through such fluff. This partly explains empty seats in some festival sessions, even after weeks of highly visible advertising campaigns. For now, the city ain’t quite ready yet. The Kolkata street is held in utter contempt by those who can manage to move whole streets and neighbourhoods across the Yamuna without much problem. Kolkata, Chennai – these cities are rather backward and have not caught on to the ideology that fires the ‘NCR’ and the annual tent it pitches in the desert – tujhe pata nahin main kaun hoon.
It turns out that January is also the month of common cold. Like an epidemic, lit-fests have sprung up all over the subcontinent. The most famous of this type bring together big names, wannabes, publishers, prodigal child-type desi wintertime migratory-birds, famous firangis, PR-wallahs, aspirational backpackers, thinking techies, sensitive MBAs, deep-thinking professors, intellectuals, Dilli-Haat type ethno-fashionistas, politicians, pimps and various other specimens into palatial tents, providing ample opportunities to see, ogle, hear, read, ask, smile, suck up, hook up, network, wheel-deal, buy and take picture with the famous. With the biggest corporates providing the platform for the sensitive kind to ponder about the various literary explorations of the ‘human condition’, the lit-fests achieve precisely what they were set up to do – provide talking points for the subcontinent’s bhasha-challenged Anglophone sliver along with a sense of ‘meaningful’ achievement and engagement that is not very different from what others feel by doing darshan much less pretentiously at Kedarnath-Badrinath. Much like the nuclear bomb, everyone (in this case the Anglicized section of every brown city) wants to have one and be counted.
The lit-fest epidemic captures media-space in a way that all book-fairs of India put together cannot, even if the latter far outstrips the former in terms of number of attendees (just the Kolkata Book Fair has more attendees than all lit-fests put together), authors, publishers, conversations, variety, dialogues, events, sessions and spin-offs. Metropolitan book-fairs have resulted in lively annual book-fairs in many small-towns and city neighbourhoods. The sweeper who cleans the palace for the fest can take his wife and child to the fair. The sanitized and hence fake ‘public’ space needs to be super-celebrated, so that the real commons can be marginalized. This strategic over-counting of lit-fests and predictable under-counting of book-fairs isn’t accidental. That’s how lit-fests have come to rule headlines and hashtags. They know that for most media, the flavour of the week is always more newsworthy than the flavour of the weak. (IPA Service)