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Literary Review
Celebrating a milestone
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Katha, the independent publishing house specialising in translations, is 15 years old. NILANJANA S. ROY attended the birthday bash.
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TO reach the sanctum sanctorum, the area where, over five days, translators, writers, critics, editors, performers and artists would hold elevated discussions about Deep Stories and Silences, you had to perform a small pilgrimage.
Past the serried rows of parked cars outside the India International Centre, where mike announcements calling for Driver Rajinder, gaadi number 7139 add their rhythmic counterpoint to High Literary Speech; through the winding path to the Rock Garden; past the tables set up for a buffet lunch; through the small room where stacks of books on Sufism, Drama, Politics and Dalit Writing are spread out for display (prominent, for some reason, a very old and battered copy of Naipaul's Area of Darkness), until you finally reach a space of relative openness and clarity. There are moments during this chautauqua when the quest for the deep stories and silences promised by the title meanders similarly, where the unwary participant runs the risk of ending up in a blind alley.
Over the years, Katha has grown from an independent publishing house specialising in translations into a many-tentacled NGO whose activism extends beyond the written word. This is Katha's 15th birthday bash, and they have earned this celebration.
The atmosphere, at first strangely unlike what one might expect from a literary festival, gradually coalesces into something more familiar. It's like watching a classic Indian wedding, terms like "contextualise" and "theory of humiliation" replacing tinselly Hindi film songs, with the same cast of people — 30 for the small, intimate functions, perhaps 200 for the big events — endlessly recycled. As with the quintessential wedding, the evening moves away from discussion into drama, or music. And as with the Indian wedding, you're expected to "adjust", when a key speaker (Javed Akhtar, on one occasion) is a no-show, or when another speaker (Gopal Guru, on several) demonstrates that he shares some of the same attributes as a non-stop hit parade music cassette, including auto-reverse.
If you're patient, the deep stories lie in wait, almost but not quite out of reach. A panel discussion on "Translating Desire" holds the audience riveted as academic Ratna Kapur points out that we still locate desire within a firm matrix: heterosexual, marital, monogamous, possibly reproductive. Often, the performers are more eloquent than the writers. Adoor Gopalakrishnan points us towards stories that can be shared by more than one author — and how this resulted in an accusation that he'd "plagiarised" the plot of a film on the late hangman of Travancore from a book he'd never read. Leela Sampson and Navina Jaffa bring the discourse of dance into the relatively dry terrain of literary criticism. Urvashi Butalia talks about the silence around stories like Partition and the silences in publishing; Krishna Sobti addresses her audience as intimately as if we share every last drop of her passion for writing.
The figure of U.R. Ananthamurthy looms over the discussions and debates, though we hear too little from him. Ritu Menon, cofounder of Kali for Women, presides over one of the more promising discussions on women as witches: shunned, destroyed, but also liberated by embracing the forbidden. The auditorium fills up for a presentation by Ghulam Mohammad Sheikh, and then again for a screening — private, since it faces an Indian version of the Death of a Thousand Cuts from the censor board — of Anand Patwardhan's documentary, "Jang Aur Aman". He explores the nuclear policies of the BJP back-to-back with the reaction in Pakistan, juxtaposes Hiroshima against the untold story of the damage sustained by workers in nuclear plants in India. The Censor Board's demands were moderate — remove every shot of political leaders, excise the bit about Nathuram Godse killing Gandhi, in short, edit out anything that might provoke an audience to think.
There are the problem areas that crop up not just with this Katha conference but in most literary symposiums in India. The subject of "writing the body" evokes discomfort in many writers. Acclaimed Australian author Peter Carey arrives, announcing cheerfully that he was asked to speak on "permanence and impermanence", then on his "life and times" and now discovers it's the "sacred and the profane". Then he delivers a blistering, resonant reading. The audience is sparse; the biradari is missing, and no outside enthusiast has been tempted by the bait of this legendary author. Post-Carey, we walk the long and winding road that leads to a score of speeches that represent Indian oratory at its worst: self-conscious, unoriginal, and mind-numbingly repetitive.
The tedium is a result of the inescapable law of Indian conferences, which decrees that, a) to have six people or more on a panel dooms you to one hour of introductions and one hour of farewells and, b) despite this, every conference worth its salt will have no less than six people on any given panel.
No one else seems to mind either the absence of an audience aside from themselves or the frequent boredom punctuated by a sudden moment when the level of discourse rises just to show us what these writers, who've travelled so far across geographical and mental distances to be here, can do. The general spirit of bonhomie and celebration lifts even curmudgeons like me over the worst stretches of inanity.
My cat is less equivocal, expressing her opinion of my absences right on the beautifully crafted Katha bag. Is this to be taken as a critique? As a participant said at the conference, "That is a deeply philosophical question, which requires much contemplation and recourse to serious thought."
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