Day two at the Jaipur Literature Festival

The bee's knees

A weak, cold rain nearly ruined the second day of the Jaipur Literature Festival. It was impossible to ignore it, even inside the tents. The organisers were clearly unprepared; William Dalrymple said that’s because it’s never happened before.  But it turned around remarkably well, and the confusion was a happy one. Umbrellas bobbed all over Diggi Palace. People huddled together, despite the needle drizzle, and sat on wet chairs to hear sessions like  “Pirates of the Indian Ocean” and “War, Politics and the Novel”.  Because the lawns were closed off, sessions were squashed and moved to the indoor venues, leading people to attend things they might otherwise never have. While waiting for a session on “Writing Resistance”, I ended up watching a charmingly intense and learned talk about bumblebees, of all things.

Birth, death and DSC

Jhumpa Lahiri won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, worth 50,000 dollars, for The Lowland. She Skyped in from Rome, saying she had been "working on this novel ever since I started writing". Lahiri had formidable competition - Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, Kamila Shamsie, Bilal Tanweer, and Romesh Gunesekara. The sponsor, HS Narula of DSC, delivered a slightly passive-aggressive speech about how he was invited to sponsor JLF in its early days, when it was a nearly-stillborn baby. He went on with the nursing and mothering metaphor for a while, described the prize as a "creative toy" that he gave his baby, and then abruptly announced that DSC was done with the JLF, and that this was the last one.

Almost famous

JLF is the place where literary stars, such as they are, come down to earth.  Those who are not immediately recognisable, or don’t insist on recognition, have a particularly hard landing. Self-deprecation is seemingly alien to this soil. Vijay Seshadri, for one, was thoroughly condescended to by an interviewer. After clucking about the general state of poetry, she decided he was a nobody before the Pulitzer, and pitied his obscure publisher (Seshadri: "But Graywolf is good! It’s just an independent press."). She expressed grudging approval of a line of his, saying it would do, “even for a movie”. Then she offered to set him up with someone in India for his upcoming memoir, pushing him to finally insist that he was actually something of a success.

Amit Chaudhuri, also mild of manner, was refused a new lunch plate by the stern servers. No pleading on his behalf was accepted. But according to another old JLF hand, at least he fared better than David Remnick a couple of years ago, who was noisily ticked off for taking a naan ahead of his turn.