Day four at the Jaipur Literature Festival

People of the book

Weekends at the Jaipur Literature Festival are intense affairs; thousands of new people pour in to Diggi Palace to catch what they can. To get to a session on time involves great calculation, and if you get a seat, you can never leave it. Some moshing experience would be useful, if you intend to fight the flow of the crowd heading to the star sessions. “Why isn’t there a separate line for delegates?” an obnoxious person demanded, outside the hall where a session on rasa and Indian aesthetics was being held. But there isn’t, and that’s the lovely thing about the JLF. The discussion on aesthetics touched on ideas like rasa, dhwani and vakrokti, but veered away from the usual mystifications and complicated the idea of a timeless, singular Indian tradition. Ashok Vajpeyi observed how classical music and dance, unlike literature, seemed to have resisted the colonial experience and the cultural amnesia it brought. "There are songs about small-time nawabs and deities, as you would expect, but none in praise of the angrez bahadur."

At last, Naipaul

The most talked about presence at the festival, VS Naipaul, took the stage in the afternoon with Farrukh Dhondy playing interviewer. They spoke of Naipaul’s formal experiment, his approach to reportage and fiction, his early rejection and his great faith in himself. Dhondy used a combination of flattery and persistence, retreating when Naipaul wasn’t forthcoming on certain questions, asking them again later. Nadira Naipaul sat behind her husband’s wheelchair, whispering to him and encircling him with her arms to hold the microphone up. Naipaul himself was in a benign mood, often complimenting himself “that’s a good title” and “it’s a funny book, the dialogue is wonderful”. When his books on India came up, Naipaul agreed with Dhondy that they had been misunderstood, that his factual observations had been mistaken for prejudice. At that point, Nadira Naipaul pitched in to explain how bewildered his family in Trinidad had been by this bitter reception of his books. Naipaul’s mother had a limited stock of Indian words, and beta was one of them. And so she said to him, “beta, leave India to the Indians”.

What a poem knows

Arundhathi Subramaniam won the first Khushwant Singh memorial prize for poetry. Afterwards, a group of poets commanded the large front lawns of Diggi Palace, which they seemed to find incredible. Poetry is usually confined to a café or a small tent at most festivals, said Ruth Padel. In most places, if the audience outnumbers the poets, we’re doing well, joked Jeet Thayil. While Padel and Ashok Vajpeyi spoke about poetry being ignored by the media, Neil Rennie said he had mixed feelings about this distance between the poet and the reader, that poets were historically often exiles and deviants. Thayil suggested that poetry served as prayer in a godless world, which is why newspapers like the New York Times chose to print poetry after 9/11 or when people read poems at funerals. Vijay Seshadri said that poetry is, in fact, the living spirit of language, the one vocation where language not used in an instrumental way, but where language is served.