It’s bitterly cold in Jaipur. It’s so cold that Jonathan Franzen, freshly arrived from San Francisco, declared that he was, for once, delighted to be sitting in the spotlight since the spotlight actually felt slightly warm.
But this unseasonable cold snap poses a bit of a problem. After all, the Jaipur Literature Festival’s detractors have always muttered that it’s more a fashion mela than it is about books and writers, and it turns out that too few people have brought stylish woolens along. Of course, this being a books mela, there are Bengalis. And so there are monkey caps in various gaudy colours, but it is far from clear that this is sufficient to satisfy those with relatively refined sartorial tastes.
And, speaking of Bengalis, the High Priest of Bengalihood, Amartya Sen himself, turned up to deliver JLF's inaugural address and promptly gave everyone the headline for tomorrow – failing a surprise arrival by a monkey-capped Salman Rushdie – by announcing that he was, as it happens, a bit of a right-winger. He wanted a pro-market, pro-business party in power, he said – as long as it didn’t “privilege one religion over another”. Yes, and I want a warmer jacket, but neither Professor Sen nor I am likely to get our wish.
Perhaps that’s artificial, as I said, a product of our over-mediatised age. But perhaps it’s also a reminder of the original purpose of writing – to influence events – and of reading – to interpret them. We, in this decadent and self-obsessed age, like to think of writing as merely self-expression, therapy in print. Even that prince of egotists, Oscar Wilde, who popularised the 19th-century French saying “art for art’s sake”, might raise an lazy eyebrow at the surprising turn of events in which ars gratia artis has become not the provocative slogan raised by velvet-vested aesthetes, but the mainstream opinion on the subject. In places where divisions are real, where problems are pressing, where temporal authority is distrusted and spiritual truth is indiscernible, art – especially writing, even fiction – swings inexorably towards having a Purpose. Regardless of what writers or impresarios would want.
Franzen, in conversation with Chandrahas Choudhary, helpfully presented this process in all its schizophrenic glory. He began by pointing out that he had trouble writing himself into his books, and in a manner more common in Northern California then in the place that claims to have invented yoga, said that that was because he was not himself “centred”. So far, so self-expression-y. But, as he pointed out, he wrote novels in the style of the 19th century – big, sprawling family sagas, which took on descriptive and explanatory tasks. At that time, he argued, people read (Dickens, I suppose) to understand what debtors’ prison was like. To figure out the life of a miner, they read. To appreciate a battlefield, they read. The purpose of a novel was to have a purpose. “They didn’t have TV,” explained Franzen. Well, Jonathan, neither do we. I mean, we don’t have TV that really explains the world to us. And that’s why we, in this country, either read, or at least really want to.
That’s why Chetan Bhagat, a man who writes his novels on spreadsheets, is in fact a real and influential public intellectual: because people sense that, in his novels, he is saying something about national integration or communal rioting or the educational system, and they trust his voice. They need and search for further explanation. And, in a country where divisions – political, social, religious – are so sharp and so rarely addressed with any directness, the statements and readings of novelists, sociologists, or philosopher-economists serve as that explanation, as points of entry into the real discussions of politics.
It is cold in Jaipur. But don’t expect the temperature of the coverage, or of the ideas, to be any lower than in the past. How could it be? An apolitical festival of words? Of words without political purpose? Not here, not now.
mihir.sharma@bsmail.in
But this unseasonable cold snap poses a bit of a problem. After all, the Jaipur Literature Festival’s detractors have always muttered that it’s more a fashion mela than it is about books and writers, and it turns out that too few people have brought stylish woolens along. Of course, this being a books mela, there are Bengalis. And so there are monkey caps in various gaudy colours, but it is far from clear that this is sufficient to satisfy those with relatively refined sartorial tastes.
And, speaking of Bengalis, the High Priest of Bengalihood, Amartya Sen himself, turned up to deliver JLF's inaugural address and promptly gave everyone the headline for tomorrow – failing a surprise arrival by a monkey-capped Salman Rushdie – by announcing that he was, as it happens, a bit of a right-winger. He wanted a pro-market, pro-business party in power, he said – as long as it didn’t “privilege one religion over another”. Yes, and I want a warmer jacket, but neither Professor Sen nor I am likely to get our wish.
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What’s interesting, though, is that JLF is likely to live up to its reputation as a place where the slightly musty, slightly fusty, world of book-loving suddenly turns into a discussion of the political issue du jour. Perhaps that’s just the presence of cameras and large numbers of semi-employed journalists looking to justify their train tickets to their editors. But, either way, however “apolitical” the organisers might want the Festival to be, it takes a turn towards politics every single time.
Perhaps that’s artificial, as I said, a product of our over-mediatised age. But perhaps it’s also a reminder of the original purpose of writing – to influence events – and of reading – to interpret them. We, in this decadent and self-obsessed age, like to think of writing as merely self-expression, therapy in print. Even that prince of egotists, Oscar Wilde, who popularised the 19th-century French saying “art for art’s sake”, might raise an lazy eyebrow at the surprising turn of events in which ars gratia artis has become not the provocative slogan raised by velvet-vested aesthetes, but the mainstream opinion on the subject. In places where divisions are real, where problems are pressing, where temporal authority is distrusted and spiritual truth is indiscernible, art – especially writing, even fiction – swings inexorably towards having a Purpose. Regardless of what writers or impresarios would want.
Franzen, in conversation with Chandrahas Choudhary, helpfully presented this process in all its schizophrenic glory. He began by pointing out that he had trouble writing himself into his books, and in a manner more common in Northern California then in the place that claims to have invented yoga, said that that was because he was not himself “centred”. So far, so self-expression-y. But, as he pointed out, he wrote novels in the style of the 19th century – big, sprawling family sagas, which took on descriptive and explanatory tasks. At that time, he argued, people read (Dickens, I suppose) to understand what debtors’ prison was like. To figure out the life of a miner, they read. To appreciate a battlefield, they read. The purpose of a novel was to have a purpose. “They didn’t have TV,” explained Franzen. Well, Jonathan, neither do we. I mean, we don’t have TV that really explains the world to us. And that’s why we, in this country, either read, or at least really want to.
That’s why Chetan Bhagat, a man who writes his novels on spreadsheets, is in fact a real and influential public intellectual: because people sense that, in his novels, he is saying something about national integration or communal rioting or the educational system, and they trust his voice. They need and search for further explanation. And, in a country where divisions – political, social, religious – are so sharp and so rarely addressed with any directness, the statements and readings of novelists, sociologists, or philosopher-economists serve as that explanation, as points of entry into the real discussions of politics.
It is cold in Jaipur. But don’t expect the temperature of the coverage, or of the ideas, to be any lower than in the past. How could it be? An apolitical festival of words? Of words without political purpose? Not here, not now.
mihir.sharma@bsmail.in