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Literary Review
The First Word War
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ANURADHA ROY writes her way through the crossfire and the various battle positions taken by institutions and authors at the recently concluded literary festivals in New Delhi.
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WE are a country of fighter-cocks. Someone only has to fall off a bicycle to start berating passers-by for the mishap; upon which passers-by divide up efficiently into those shouting back and those gawping.
Between February 18 and 23, over the most exhaustingly literary week we have had in a long time, we the readers were cheering from the sides as a whole bunch of gifted writers donned their metaphoric shiny shorts and stepped into the ring. Here is an eyewitness account of battles between:
The Homely and the Worldly: Rather like the MTNL digging up a road the PWD has tarred 10 minutes before, two government departments, with astounding lack of coordination, organised literary festivals precisely the same week, in the same city, inviting many of the same people. One was the Sahitya Akademi's annual festival of letters. The other, At Home in The World (AHTW) was organised by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), which usually brings us dance troupes from Outer Uzbekistan.
While the Akademi's festival took place largely in its drab, pre-liberalisation auditorium, the ICCR went in for opulence and exotic locales. The chasm between the hair-gelled and the hair-oiled, genteel poverty and loud confidence, prompted Mahasweta Devi to say she wanted no part in parvenu displays of luxury.
The mildly-spoken K. Satchidanandan, poet, and secretary of the Sahitya Akademi, told me that by the time they were informed about the other festival they were too far advanced in their own arrangements to make changes. Eminent writers like Krishna Sobti and Vijay Tendulkar, who had to choose, chose the Sahitya Akademi.
Why didn't the ICCR pick other dates? The answers may lie in Sir Vidia's appointment book.
Why didn't the two departments just collaborate and produce one mega-festival? The answer may lie in bureaucratic egos.
This leads quite effortlessly to the battle between:
The Mother Tongue and the Other Tongue: This one was so bitter it might just prove cathartic. Balchandra Nemade has long wanted to tell people like Amitav Ghosh and V.S. Naipaul that they are a rootless, mercenary bunch of nobodies, and now he had the opportunity: "They are all ignorant," he said indignantly, "even Naipaul. How could Naipaul just write a book on India because his publisher told him to? Is that any reason to write a book?" Krishna Sobti, refined and temperate, said she found it impossible to understand why really good writers and critics in the local languages had been left out. And why was there no writer from the regional languages on the panels that read from their works in Delhi's colleges?
Mother-tonguers spoke of the inauthenticity of English depictions of Indian realities. Botanical metaphors flew fast and furious as one accused the other of rootlessness. Sir V.S. Naipaul, meanwhile, with Rushdian ignorance, announced at the opening of the AHTW that apart from the renaissance in Bengal, modern Indian literature has only existed for the last 40 years. Khushwant Singh, ever ready for combat, said that those who write in English were fighting an unequal battle: "They can read us, but we can't read them." With perverse glee he informed bhasha writers that those who write in English would continue to earn more royalty and continue to be more widely read. Ananthamurthy smiled gently. "If I take him seriously," he said, "it would look foolish."
The two battles, between institutions and between languages, resulted in an informal boycott by writers as a form of silent protest. Participants whose names were on various panels stayed away, among them Arundhati Roy, Krishna Sobti, Chandrasekhar Kambar, Upamanyu Chatterjee. Perhaps the protest was required. But then again, perhaps the protesters could have been a little more public about staying away and spared the rest of us slogging it across town to hear and see our favourite writers, only to find empty chairs betokening their disapproval.
There was another related battle, between:
The Champa and the Frangipani: This one led to war. A range of writers, from Nirmal Verma and Sitangshu Yashashchandra to U.R. Ananthamurthy and Roberto Callaso, lectured Indians to revive their cultural heritage. Ancient Indian texts were mentioned as examples of this heritage: The Ramayana, Mahabharata, Katha Sarit Sagar. "What of Bugs Bunny?" someone plaintively asked. "I'm Goan Christian and that's my heritage." Mukul Kesavan stood up to applaud a sense of the past but wanted to know if there was no past worth remembering between the folklore of ancient India and colonial times.
Roberto Callasso, author of a widely read book on Indian epics, would brook no such questioning and continued to urge ahistoric Indians to appreciate the value of their cultural past. A silently simmering Amitav Ghosh exploded. "Roberto Callasso is always berating Indian writers for a variety of sins...," he said, "...that Indian writers don't have a sense of the past...I am amazed at the astonishing impertinence of this drivel. It is precisely the subject of shame and pride of the past that forms the subject of some of our writing." The portly Callasso, later that evening, gave a Meditteranean shrug about the fracas. "It's OK," he said, "A beet obscene, but OK."
This battle was fun. It was about ideas.
Talking of ideas, there was another battle in that realm, and this one was between:
The Shadow and the Substance: At festivals abroad, writers read from their works. It is a tried and tested formula, the idea being to give people a sense of their writing. Apart from the two readings in Delhi's colleges, the only readings at AHTW seem to have taken place protected from the curious ears of an audience, in the seclusion of Neemrana.
In Delhi, the festival was structured into panel discussions on high-sounding literary topics in which the word "identity" and its metaphorical antonyms and synonyms — exile, multiculturalism, home, nation — recurred like persistent tics. Writers discussed these and other topics ad nauseam, sometimes fascinatingly, at other times not. Discoursing, pointed out a weary Ian Jack, editor of Granta is not necessarily the forte of writers. Too many of them rambled, perhaps because they had not come prepared to discourse. To some writers, the topics seemed jejune. The organisers, tired with all the work they had done, and feeling unappreciated, fought back, saying the writers could have converted every session into readings around the given themes. "But I didn't know I was allowed to read," Shashi Deshpande pointed out logically. "I don't carry my books around everywhere."
At the Sahitya Akademi festival, I chanced upon an illuminating and dazzlingly lucid lecture in Hindi by the eminent critic Namvar Singh. Vijay Tendulkar gave a riveting talk on criminals he had known. If the participants at the AHTW had been asked for prepared papers, they may have come up with such wonderful surprises too. As it was, on the penultimate day the ever gentle Allan Sealy was uncharacteristically vehement when asked to speak. Everything had been "overmetaphorised", he said. He was fed up. He wanted to see the trees in his garden coming into leaf. He wanted to go back home: to a house, not an abstract "Home", a house made of bricks, and like Dr. Johnson, he wanted to kick the gate of his house open and feel it hard upon his toes.
Wonderful junket for some, exciting and fraught week for others, but how nice to be back home.
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