Day one at Jaipur Literature Festival

What poetry does

Day One of the Jaipur Literature Festival began with all the usual special effects - pounding drums, billowing tents, and the general static of high expectation. The contemplative keynote session on the poetic imagination, though, was more of a piece with the hazy Jaipur morning. The Indian-American poet and Pulitzer-winner Vijay Seshadri did not set out to defend poetry in the traditional way - instead, he wondered aloud about what poetry does. In India, so consumed by its own challenges, Seshadri confessed to feeling that he had to account for himself and fight the sense that his work was an indulgence, while in the US, with all the freedom of a surplus economy, he felt the culture had to account to him.  Poetry and the inwardness it demands, and its insistence of an “individual’s recognition of her sovereignty”, was essential to democracy and freedom, he said. Ashok Vajpeyi, who followed him, spoke of poets as “legislators of the unacknowledged world”, while Arvind Krishna Mehrotra talked of Kabir and of poetry as the real wakefulness in a sleepwalking life. Poetry is a running theme in this edition of JLF, with several hours of public performance.

Men, women and other anti-climaxes

Eleanor Catton, who won the Booker at the age of 27 for her hyper-plotted Victorian mystery novel, The Luminaries, discussed thorny matters of public recognition with Eimear McBride, whose now-celebrated debut novel, A Girl is Half-Formed Thing, was written in six months but mouldered for nine years as it awaited a publisher.

Catton spoke of how hard it was, even for her, to get beyond the default male point of view, which is seen as neutral. Her book uses the zodiac as a device to tell the stories of 12 men. But had they been women, Catton said, “it wouldn’t be a book about astrology any more, it would be a book about women”.

Happy homicide

The sleeper hit of the day, at least for me, was a delightful session on crime fiction and the Nordic noir. Nils Nordberg and Hakan Nesser, riffed off each other like bantering siblings -- on how killing characters was the easiest bit, how love and murder were the only worthwhile subjects and why the image of the law as benign, and cops as good, shaped their crime fiction. Indians might find the cynical mood of a Dashiel Hammett, its awareness of corruption and its weird code of honour, more appealing, suggested Nordberg. To persistent questions about how Nordic weather, with its short days and long cold nights, shaped their writing, Nesser said, it may be best to “plan the murder in the dark and commit it in the daylight”.