Do we really need more literature festivals?

It is that time of the year again. The divas are getting ready to crack their (literary) whips with imperiousness and not a little impatience and the dons are tossing their hats at the windmills of (literary) convention. And the authors? Mixing memory with desire, they are bracing themselves for the cruellest months of the literary calendar. For, the season is upon us, the season of lit fests which every self-respecting author looks forward to with an eagerness mixed with equal amounts of trepidation.

Where will one be invited? Will it only be the B-towns in the provincial outposts, or will it be the bigger and prestigious ones where everyone who matters in the literary world will show up? Will it be to speak or only moderate? And what if it’s some "sidey" session that no one particularly cares for? And, should the Devi deign to smile, will it be the JLF yet again (the Jaipur lit fest to the uninitiated and the mother of all lit fests to those who know)?

For some years now, from October till February, every big and small city and town has taken to organising a literary festival, aka literary carnival in some cases thus giving away the real spirit behind some of these initiatives. My own experience of lit fests over the past few years has been uneven. Some are boring to the point of being vapid and mind-numbing with all the usual suspects you don’t especially want to meet let alone "hang out" within the endless evenings that are set aside for networking and socialising with some "cultural performances" thrown in for good measure. 

Some are badly organised with delayed sessions, missing speakers, indifferent hosts, bad food and dodgy lodgings.  Some are no better than tamasha: in a classic case of sour grapes, those who are not invited profess disdain and others flock to them tamasha notwithstanding. Some work with clockwork precision with an iron hand in a velvet glove guiding the proceedings and an eye-in-the-sky micro-managing the smallest detail. And it is these, the ones with the seamlessly smooth operations outsourced to professionally-run event management firms that are responsible for turning lit fests into spectacles where writers must perforce become performers.

With generous budgets and high-end sponsors (more often than not whiskey companies where IMFL flows like water in the Author’s Lounge), they offer a great place to chill out with the cool set.

But if you are not especially cool and don’t particularly want to chill out, or if you write in one of the bhashas, or if you come harbouring literary aspirations, you will fit in just as much as a square peg in a round hole. By and large, lit fests work best for the "greater adepts", those who are good at positioning themselves or have better contacts or better social skills.

Not the most egalitarian of places, the focus is almost always on those writers who can perform or deliver better, not on those who are better or even more popular writers. The bhasha writers suffer most because more often than not they have poor communication skills in English or publishers whose pockets are not as deep as the larger international publishing houses and who cannot therefore pitch them and their books in the way that bigger, mainstream publishers can. But then, the world we live in is not an equal one; how can lit fests provide an equal space?

The line between literature and performance was blurred long before lit fests became de rigueur. The real culprits were the glitzy book launches in metropolitan cities where an author was expected to be witty and charming or provocative and challenging about his/her book; sedate, sober, sensible stuff seldom went down well with the audience or the organisers. One of the least attractive things about modern-day publishing in India is a tendency to peg an event on the author rather than the book.

Unfortunately, this one aspect of contemporary literature has been picked up and blown out of all proportion by the lit fests; the personality rules and the quality of writing is often overlooked. And so while one is willing to believe that the intentions, for the most part, are good and noble and usually stem from celebrating literature, somewhere along the way, lit fests have become more about grabbing eyeballs, getting more footfall, and claiming more print and media space.

So why go to these lit fests you might well ask? Except for a fleeting sense of self-importance – that soon passes after the first few experiences of litfesting – at best there is the "feel-good factor", of being acknowledged by one’s peers among the writers’ community. But beyond that, they yield little to a serious writer. Of course, there is the slim chance that you will meet at least one interesting person, a fellow writer who is, like you, coping with the vagaries of writing and has, like you, taken the trouble to get out of a self-imposed isolation in the hope of hearing something new and interesting.

Every now and then, the literary gods throw you a googly. When you are least expecting it, you end up having a fabulous time because of a near-perfect combination of contents and company. One such occasion was the Sanatkada Festival in Lucknow with its serious literary discussions in the beautifully-preserved Baradari followed by a glorious mélange of food stalls offering the best culinary traditions of Awadh.

The first edition of the Kumaon Literary festival too holds the promise of something different and meaningful; designed as a retreat for writers and thinkers in the picturesque little village of Dhanachuli, it offers a space for leisurely discussions spread out over five days.

Spectacle or not, lit fests are here to stay, and are only going to get bigger and will most likely mushroom in every town and hamlet. As long as they foster the habit of reading and encourage new ways of seeing the world, I would say the more the merrier. As long as the focus is on writing, ideas, thoughts and opinions, let a thousand festivals bloom I say!