"Literary festivals: the journey" by Vidyadhar Gadgil

Vidyadhar Gadgil on how a neighbouring country’s literature festival has successfully portrayed the different narrative streams there




Over the past few years, there has been a huge growth in literature festivals across India. Habitual carpers may say that we now have more literature festivals than readers of serious literature, but there is no gainsaying the fact that these literature festivals present a twofold opportunity: bringing the best writers from across the world to readers in towns across India, and enabling the literature of the region in which the venue of the festival is located to find a wider audience.


It was the Jaipur Literature Festival, which began in 2006, that set the trend. The inaugural edition had a number of big-name writers, including Hari Kunzru, Namita Gokhale and William Dalrymple, but only around a hundred people attended, including some who, according to Dalrymple, appeared to be ‘tourists who had simply got lost.’ Yet from that uncertain start, the festival has grown exponentially – by 2011 there were over 30,000 attendees and the list of featured writers read like a who’s who of world literature. Too numerous to list, let it suffice to say that there were two Nobel Prize winners present, J M Coetzee and Orhan Pamuk. The Jaipur Literature Festival has become a ‘must-attend’ event for lovers of literature, also having been described, rather gushingly, as the ‘greatest literary show on earth’.


One of the fallouts of the Jaipur festival has been its catalytic effect in the growth of smaller festivals, not only across India but across the region as a whole, each with a distinct identity. Much of the credit for this must go to the co-director of the Jaipur festival, Namita Gokhale, who has tirelessly encouraged and promoted the staging of festivals across the region. Importantly, these festivals, in the tradition set by Jaipur, have been free and open to all. Guwahati itself is now gearing up for its own literature festival in January 2012. As it does so, one festival whose example it could benefit from is the Kathmandu Literary Jatra, held in Kathmandu in September 2011.

Guwahati is the hub of Northeast India, and as such it provides an opportunity to showcase the myriad literatures of this region – inhabited, like Nepal, by a multiplicity of ethnicities and communities, each with their distinctive voices. The Kathmandu literary festival, held at the historic Patan museum, had its share of literary heavyweights like Namita Gokhale, Tarun Tejpal, Mohammad Hanif and others. But it stood out in its showcasing of literature from Nepal, going beyond literature produced in Nepali to highlight writing in other, less known languages of the country, like Newari and Maithali. Also, as the only country in the region which residents of all South Asian countries can visit without any hassles (visas are available on arrival), Kathmandu is the ideal hub where writers from across the region can interact. With writers from Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Nepal present, the socio-cultural commonalities of the region were evident, and a small beginning was made in terms of developing a vision for a pan-regional literature – a vision that will hopefully develop as the Kathmandu festival grows further in the years to come.


There were a variety of fascinating sessions – on ‘Insurgency and Nepali Literature’, ‘The New Age of News’, ‘Dalit Voices in Literature’ and ‘Narratives as a Window to History’ to name a few – but it was the session on ‘Bridging the Language Divide’ that could offer valuable pointers to how Northeast India needs to approach the issue of bringing to the fore the various voices in the region, ensuring that dominant groups and communities do not crowd out other voices. The panelists included Nepali-language writer Yuyutsu Sharma, literary critic from Kalimpong Anmole Prasad, writer Namita Gokhale and Alka Saraogi, who writes primarily in Hindi. They all stressed the importance of translation in making local literatures more widely known – not only translations from local and regional languages to English, as we commonly assume to be the norm, but translations from one regional language directly into another.


Another issue of relevance to Northeast India, and of particular interest of festival advisor Namita Gokhale, who is herself from Uttarakhand, is the need to acquaint readers with literature from the mountains. Just a month prior to the Kathmandu literary jatra, there was a literature festival held in Bhutan, and now the Guwahati festival can continue the trend by showcasing literature from the Assam and the Northeast.

Literary festivities - Uddipana Goswami

 Uddipana Goswami, Literary Editor

Literary festivals seem to have a way of inciting strong reactions from people, for various political or ideological reasons. In 2011 itself, the debates surrounding the Harud Literary Festival, for instance, or the one at Galle, have been much too publicised to require revisiting here. The respective political climates of the proposed venues were such that extreme points of view were bound to surface. But even independent of the backdrop of State politics and its various manifestations, literary festivals have often been criticised as a means of consolidating corporate agendas, nursing the not-so-insignificant writerly egos and what have you. Similar allegations have also been levelled against literary workshops which have been mushrooming at a very fast pace indeed.

Those who do raise such allegations may choose to refrain from having anything to do with these events. At the other extreme are those who would give an arm and a leg to be invited to these festivals or to take part in these workshops. Anecdotes about such wannabes who shamelessly hound publishers or prostrate themselves at the feet of literary celebrities abound in the festival circuits. And then there are the ‘celebrities’ themselves who use these platforms for self-aggrandizement and as a means to reinforce their literary greatness.

The literary festivals that have been proliferating internationally in the past few decades in keeping with the rising culture of urban festivals, has brought the writer out of her isolation and shaped her into a public figure. The workshops have also evolved from closed groups, locally organised, to internationally publicised competitive forums. These are the side effects of globalisation. In the glitz and glamour of these events, however, what gets lost is the essence of writing and literature.

After all, literary festivals and workshops are not a modern-day innovation suddenly thought up by a bunch of festival organisers with either an evil corporate agenda to serve or a noble calling to cater to the greater good, the holy word. Literature has been celebrated and festivities arranged around its narration and performance since the first storyteller collected a bunch of avid listeners by the bonfire. The first workshops were the family gatherings where oral literature was handed down from one generation to the next. Their forms have changed through the centuries and they have evolved into the much-maligned or much-celebrated events that they are today while their true intent has got lost somewhere along the way.

The literary world and the writer have always been celebrated in many different ways – why should we stop now? In fact, if these events give the writer more visibility – even a celebrity status – why complain? The problem, however, is that there is a fine line between celebrating literature and sensationalising the writer, between what is commercially and aesthetically beneficial for all those involved in the trade and craft of writing and what serves particular corporate and/or political interests. It is not easy to determine that line or walk on one or the other side of it.

For instance, the spring Bihu of Assam is really a grand celebration of youth, life and love. It is a symbol of our ethnic unity, a festival that originated from primal fertility rites practised by the many tribes of Assam. Today however, it has lost its true essence and remains a much more sanitised version of its original form. From the open fields, it moved to the stage, from the stage, it has now moved to the visual and virtual media. Earlier observed exclusively through community participation, it now invites corporate sponsorship. But for all this, we do still celebrate Bihu because somewhere it does still exult us; the sound of a mohor xingor pepa, the strains of a Bihu song, or the swaying bodies of the Bihu dancers do still set our hearts racing. Bihu, despite the cosmetic changes it has undergone over the centuries, retains its ethos.

Similarly, literature that gives us joy, writers who enrich our minds, in any case, inspire celebration, no matter in what form or forum. If the blatant commercialisation and politicisation of this celebration hurts our sensibilities, we may choose to stay away. If we wish instead to ignore the external manifestations and embrace the essence, we may instead make our way to Jaipur, or Galle, or Kathmandu, or Guwahati. The choice is ours.