Day five at the Jaipur Literature Festival

If there is a Jaipur Literature Festival state of mind, it is FoMo – the fear of missing out on something more interesting in a parallel session.  On the last morning of the festival, I flitted from a discussion on the history and future of the CIA to one on how children could be given a sense for Indian painting through an illustrated Hamzanama; from a conversation on what Socrates tells us about good life, to one on the imaginative techniques used to write about distant times and places (1930s India and North Korea, in this case).

A free woman

And then I sat put for a session on Stree Shakti (woman power) by Rajasthani writers Lata Sharma, Mridula Behari and Anshu Harsh, moderated by Om Thanvi, which was practically fizzing with politics and urgency. Lata Sharma traced a history of women claiming new freedoms, working outside the home, controlling contraception, and refusing to be cowed by violence. She also spoke of the pushback against this assertion, telling the story of a sarpanch named Naurati Bai who could not be re-elected because of Rajasthan’s recent curb on those without elementary schooling fighting panchayat elections. 

Her co-panellist, Mridula Behari, took a different tack, rejecting adversarial ideas of feminism, idealising the legendary queen Padmini for immolating herself rather than submitting to Allaudin Khilji. Behari spoke of the line separating freedom and abandon, about the commodification of women and the need to command one’s own subjectivity.

The audience tore into her talk – one woman asked her who decided what kinds of freedom were decorous enough, and another told her – “My body is not obscene, it is natural, it simply is.”  People in the audience argued with each other about whether dowry was a social evil or whether it was moveable property. Someone asked the authors why many Hindi novels did not have female characters she could relate to as a young urban woman, and that she was sad to be alienated from a language she loved. Others recommended novels that did have believable, textured female characters.  And of course, at one point a man in the audience got up to scold everyone and tell them he was sick of hearing about women’s supposed oppression, that we should have gotten beyond these questions but probably never would, and that that this festival should not be a place to squabble, so shut it.

Moonstruck science

British biographer and critic Jenny Uglow, introduced by Simon Singh, presented a talk on the Lunar Society of Birmingham – a set of larger-than-life thinkers, makers, explorers and entrepreneurs like Erasmus Darwin, James Watt, Matthew Boulton, Josiah Wedgwood and Joseph Priestley. They met by the light of the full moon and made dramatic advances in chemistry, biology and manufacturing. This was a time when science could be expressed in poetry, and technical drawings could be things of beauty and artistry.  Uglow told the story of how these men (and they were all men) made and improved the steam engine, set it working in the mills and mines, and kickstarted the Industrial Revolution.  With images and quotations, she evoked a period where art, science, making and selling were all mingled. Of course, someone asked her about Vedic science and the unmanned aeroplanes that were whizzing around ancient India, but Uglow was allowed to evade the question.

To offend and be offended

While this JLF seemed to have stayed free of what everyone likes to call “controversy”, it didn’t fail to provoke. A group of young men protested at the police barricades this afternoon, waving copies of a Punjab Kesari article. The day before, writer Nand Kishore Acharya had apparently said that Ambedkar was a divisive figure and Gandhi a unifying one. The students insisted that they would not tolerate this insult, and that their protest would engulf the festival. But it was a short-lived demonstration, dispersing by the end of the lunch hour. Right after that, a session at the front lawns spoke of the threat to freedom of expression, the silencing of Perumal Murugan and others, the intimidation exercised by powerful individuals, and the responsibility of publishers. Moderator Salil Tripathi ended the session with a claim that the land of Gup would finally win over the land of Chup. But the gulf between those on the JLF panel, who had no sympathy for group offence, and those at the barricades, who feel their selfhood slighted by such words, remained as wide as ever.

The last event of the day was a garbled debate on “Has Culture become the New Politics?” with Suhel Seth, Shazia Ilmi, Arshia Sattar and Rajiv Malhotra. Together, they meandered, missed the point, talked past each other and said little of any import or originality.

Goodbye to all that

And so it ends, the eighth edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival. The stalls are being stripped, the schoolkids have headed home, and the writers are preparing for the last JLF party this evening. Closing the festival, director Namita Gokhale promised that 2016 would be the best year yet, and William Dalrymple backed her up, promising to bring Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Noam Chomsky and Thomas Piketty next year.