Day three at the Jaipur Literature Festival

Written on the body

A jokey, wide-ranging session on sex and writing enlivened the afternoon hour at the Jaipur Literary Festival on Day Three. Nicholson Baker, Sarah Waters, Hanif Kureishi and Deepti Kapoor talked dirty to a diverse audience, moderated - or rather, egged on - by NYT Book Review editor Parul Sehgal. They spoke of their first experience with sexual material, the impossibility of successfully describing sex, on taboos and political correctness. Literary novels seemed to fall into a trench when the sex scene came up, said Baker, and then pick themselves up to be literary again. He decided to stretch those moments into a whole phone-sex novel, the '90s bestseller Vox.

Kapoor spoke of how, as an Indian woman, it was important to write about sex with the same "ownership and swagger" that men do. She spoke of the sense of transgression in writing about sex, while Kureishi complained about how it had lost its edge, become banal and ubiquitous in the West.

Sarah Waters described the challenge of writing lesbian sex in a way that wasn't about titillating men. She also explained how sex always seems timeless, outside history or culture, but that it is, in fact, entirely bound by the mores of the period. There was a long argument on whether sex was really an instinct or something one learnt and got better at (Kureishi: learned, Baker, instinct. The women didn't comment). In the end, Kureishi said, the most radical thing would be a book about a happy marriage. "There are these two nice people, there's nobody else, they've liked each other for a long time, ooh!" 

The F-word

JLF being what it is, there was much interest in a session called "The First Firangis in a Strange Kind of Paradise", with academic Jonathan Gil-Harris and journalist Sam Miller introduce their books on foreigners in India, guided by William Dalrymple. Harris's book describes firangis  (he defends the word) who migrated to India in the 16th and 17th centuries. They didn't come as conquerors, invaders or imperialists, they were driven by poverty or persecution.  This was a time of Asian ascendance - the Ottoman empire, Safavid Persia and Mughal Hindustan, while Europe was an economic backwater. His book fleshes out the lives of some of these border-crossers, arguing that any singular idea of India was always being interrupted. Miller's book is a broader sweep of how India looks from the outside, but his rendition of stereotypical foreigners in India - "the British come to see the poverty and dig up their ancestor's graves, the Americans come to search for themselves, the French and Italian search for cheap gemstones", and so on - was a crowd-pleaser. 

National treasure

Suhel Seth just can't seem to get it right at literary festivals. Theatre director Tim Supple was heard grumbling about the way Seth treated him yesterday, moderating a session on Hamlet with Haider director Vishal Bharadwaj, writer Basharat Peer, and Renaissance studies professor Jerry Brotton. At the end of a clever discussion on translation and adaptation and Hamlet's political and psychological richness, Seth suddenly decided to single out Supple as the token Brit, almost accusing him of being proprietorial about Shakespeare. He informed him that Indians spoke better English and added more words to the Oxford English dictionary. The audience applauded, as it always does at any hint of any Indiawaale assertion. Supple tried to argue, several times, that he belonged to the "nation of theatre", but to no avail.