If Day One of Jaipur Literature Festival was a big fat Indian wedding, Day Two was a more solemn affair. The sedate proceedings could be attributed to the music of Rajasthan Josh that drew the entire audience into a trance last night. The day opened with a talk on “Why Books Matter” where the speakers were Patrick French, Sunil Sethi, Kiran Desai and John Makinson. The subject matter might have rhetoric written all over it, but some really piercing observations were made. Makinson said while in China, it’s mostly the self-help books that thrive, in India, there’s more intellectual curiosity and a superb spirit for making arguments.
What followed was Ben MacIntyre in conversation with Kai Bird about the former’s ‘Operation Mincemeat’, a MI5 conspiracy that was to change the course of the World War II. MacIntyre painstakingly introduced all the characters to give a vivid picture of a conspiracy that was so well-thought that it persuaded Hitler that the Mediterranean offensive would come at Greece and Sardinia.
The day already had its highlight even before the lunch when Rory Stewart, David Finkle , Jon Lee Anderson assembled to talk about the entire craft of war reporting. Moderated by Antony Lowenstein, this session generated an adrenaline rush among the audience, thanks to the speakers’ primal observations. Especially, David Finkle who criticised WikiLeaks for releasing an edited version of the Collateral Murder video (it showed the American Army killing Iraqi civilians indiscriminately). He said when WikiLeaks professed to be so transparent, it shouldn’t have edited the video that failed to show that throughout the day there were gun fights. Speaking about journalistic ethics, Anderson said that “in the end, you need to live with yourself”.
“Imaginary Homelands’ saw Ian Jack, Junot Diaz, Kamila Shamsie, Manjushree Thapa and Marina Lewycka talking about their multiple identities that helped in their writing. Jack, former Granta editor, said apart from a privileged few who shuttle between continents, there are a whole lot of disadvantaged people who are yet to be represented in modern writing. Manjushree, too, took a stab at this form of thinking and narrowed it to subcontinent — “South Asia literature is mostly upper class experience”.
An excellent bunch of travel writers like Anthony Sattin, Katie Hickman, Pallavi Aiyar (Business Standard correspondent from Brussels), Rory Stewart, William Fiennes and William Dalrymple enthralled the audience by reading out excerpts from their books. The evening’s denouement was a talk focused on trying to pin out the global standing of a non-western writer. Kiran Desai opined that 9/11 was a watershed moment in a way for the change in Western perception of non-Western writers, in a good way. Orhan Pamuk lamented that “many talented writers are not heard because they don’t write in English”. Some bittersweet food for thought that.
H M Naqvi wins the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature for his book ‘Home Boy’. The prize includes $50,000.