From the wall-sized window of my hotel room, I can see layers of the city stretching away in the morning light. Six floors below me, just across the road, are a few of the old handcarts that have plied in western Indian cities for decades. Behind them is a wall enclosing an open area smudged with the spiky umbrellas of large khejri trees, each tree flaunting the colourful kites it has captured during the recent Makar Sankranti festival. Beyond the trees are small brick structures of unplanned working-class houses and, then, the larger PWD buildings of some defunct institution built perhaps in the 1960s. In the middle distance spreads the mess of low-rise concrete you find in any medium-sized Indian city. Rising out of this are shiny, new Gurgaon-clusters — corporate and commercial buildings — their anodyne livery of glass blinking against the rise of ancient hills.
Jaipur as a city has grown and mutated massively since I used to pass through it in the 1970s. Bits of it are unrecognisable even from 14 years ago when I was here last. The literature festival has stayed constant, but again, not without changes and expansion, the transformations not loved by everybody who remembers the location and the scale of its iterations in the first decade of the century. “Kumbha Mela of literature, thiik i bolechhey ora!” (the Kumbh Mela of Literature, they are right) mutters one Bengali fellow-writer as we juice ourselves through the press of the crowd. The festival is crowded from the first day itself and it gets more packed as the weekend unfolds, the people navigating among seven venues, the many handicraft stalls and food booths, and the massive bookstore that looks as though a dense section of Calcutta’s Boi Mela has been transplanted here.
For us participants, there is the refuge of the exclusive Speakers’ Lounge, which is actually a large courtyard with food counters, a coffee station and a bar, a place where writers, moderators, and the karta-dhartas of the publishing world get to mingle away from the heat-and-dust generated by hoi polloi. The food is from a top-level hotel, the bar is sponsored by famous brands of booze, and the hotel’s own brand-roasted coffee is excellent. Moored around the tables in the courtyard you can see some of the most well-known writers and public figures from India, the UK, the US, and, to a lesser extent, other parts of the world. However, literature-types are not the only ones for whom the festival is a teerth yatra: on one day, the entourage of an ageing local royal might clear the way for ‘HH’ to come through; another day might see a fully-armed police escort twittering around some self-important looking White men in formal suits — the deputy prime minister of a European nation dipping into literature on his visit to our country; every now and then, some celebrity from Bombay might show up, or perhaps some glib-talking, orange-clad baba type, tonsured and oiled with karmic self-confidence, might bless you with his emanation, or a celebrity ex-CJI might make an appearance to pronounce on the importance of the Constitution.
Just when you begin to feel that all this is a little too much, you attend a session with some writers and you realise why the whole trip is actually worth it. Addressing a rapt audience of hundreds of people, Anuradha Roy and Stephen Alter discuss the Himalayas from their respective points of view. Suddenly Ranikhet and Mussoorie become vivid, the plants and the animals of the mountains come alive, and the relentless human assault on that environment becomes palpable. In one of the most beautiful and precious regions of the world, the high peaks are now black without their usual snow, the villages at high altitude are abandoned, the rivers are being strangled close to their birth points. And, yet, in that devastation, an unusual plant flowers, an animal looks back at you and changes how you see yourself, a trick of light reminds you this is the closest you will ever get to heaven.
In a completely different session, Arunava Sinha, Rita Kothari and Vivek Shanbhag take us into the fast expanding world of translations, from other Indian languages into English, from one regional language into another. Listening to them, you understand that it’s not just the number and the quality of translations that matter but also the environment and ongoing dialogue between languages and writers that creates a contemporary readership, which unplugs the automatic privilege granted to English and Western literatures.
At the entrance of my hotel, three men in ragged, non-city clothes have set up a small stage under a kind of tent. They do pranam to each passing guest in the hope the visitor will ask them to perform. If commanded, these Bhaats from Nagaur set their puppets dancing to drums and instruments; if not, they shiver in the cold and wait. The hotel gives them food but otherwise pays them nothing and they are solely dependent on the largesse of the tourists. As you visit other hotels and venues, you see these itinerant performers everywhere — puppeters, versions of Langas and Manganiyars, sarangi players, flautists, all placed as tokens, exiles in this harsh urban setting, trying to make a living in the ruins of their once vibrant traditions.
On stage at the festival, writers talk of the different kinds of exile they have experienced and depicted, about what exists between exile and belonging. On another panel, we approach the same theme from a different angle and talk about the spirit of place: what is it? How do writers evoke it? Is it linked to time? Across panels, themes begin to emerge: an acorn sent from England sprouts in the Himalayas, the child plant of the Buddha’s vriksha grown in a far-off monastery; from other discussions, one collects fathers and the difficulties children, especially sons, have with them; on a third panel, two descriptions of two major railway stations speak to each other.
After the panels, the media and the social media machinery quickly kicks into place. In the media centre, there are booths where authors can give quick interviews to the ‘legacy’ organs and what I call the ‘verticals’ — those channels where the camera forms a vertical frame. Some of the questioners have no clue who they are interviewing while others are scarily well-versed in authors’ works.
At the end of the day’s events, there is the after-stuff — music, drinks, dinners. On the phone screen, a maze of Ubers trapped in the aspic of traffic. In the cocktail bars, parmesan-washed vodka mixed with a reduction of cherry tomatoes, a far cry from the illicit gulabi we schoolboys would drink on trips to Jaipur half a century ago. Across meals, a collection of Rajasthan’s famous Laal Maas, the first and best one at the private dinner for the delegates, then the various ones in the restaurants and bars, then again, in the Speakers’ Lounge, the top hotel catering actually serves Laal Maas empanadas.
After five days spent among serious crowds which include lots of young people actually there to listen as well as to pose for their Insta profiles, the thought arises: what is the future of literature festivals? Is it actually literature they will explore in the future or some other sense of community that merely uses books and literature as an excuse? At some point, the softly spoken words of the Australian novelist, Richard Flanagan, ring again as a rebuke to peacocking jurisprudence — choose love, suggests Flanagan to a young person with a question about how to live a life, choose kindness, he says, instead of the ‘protestations of power’. It seems like a good message to carry away from this place.