<b>Mihir S Sharma:</b> Jaipur and the India we are

Every year, the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) faces one basic dilemma: Is it simply a place where people go to discuss books and ideas, or does it have a larger purpose? If the latter, what is that purpose — simply to reflect the India we live in, or the India we might wish to create? Every time there’s some controversy or the other, it is this essential division that is revealed. When Salman Rushdie was invited and then disinvited, it showed that a festival about books could not invite the most celebrated living Indian author in English — and it perhaps showed that in trying to, it was conscious of having a larger purpose. When Ashis Nandy was almost arrested for supposedly violating the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act with his statements about corruption – look them up, I’m not repeating them – it revealed that an idea that would not be out of place in a book or in an academic seminar room is indeed out of place in the “real” India we live in, and that the India we wish to create is so fearfully contested. 

This year, the big news was that two senior pracharaks of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) had been invited to speak. Many people were dismayed that the festival gave these men a platform to sound reasonable; others wondered what they were doing at a festival about books. But JLF is about ideas and not just books, and there’s no doubt that the ideas of the shadowy men who run India’s most powerful organisation are influential, and deserve more examination, just as their motivations and justifications for them need more light. Even if you have the stomach and the will for a fight against the RSS’ ideas, you can hardly win that fight by pretending that they do not exist. 

The line-up at JLF was instructive. Multiple icons of the new Right were there, as well as doughty and eloquent defenders of the current government, such as Amitabh Kant and Surjit Bhalla. But so were Aruna Roy and Kapil Sibal and Perumal Murugan. It might have been possible, certainly, for the festival to thrive while inviting just one “side” or the other. But then it would have abandoned its claim to be not just a books festival, but also a festival about the India that we are. As for the India that we would like to be, everything about that ideal seems so distant at the moment that I just don’t have the heart to make demands based on it. 

In the end, the headline sessions – Taslima Nasreen and the RSS this year, I suppose, as well as Suhel Seth being silenced by a panel of feminists when defending “mansplaining” – are never what you should go to JLF to see. The true virtue of JLF is the unexpected sessions, things apparently far removed from your world, which frequently turn out to be not so distant at all. For me, the great joy of JLF this year was the two sessions I attended with the brilliant British historian Neil MacGregor. Mr MacGregor, who runs the British Museum, has made a particular sort of history-telling his own: One which takes real, tangible objects, and uses them to create a vivid picture of life in the past. In one of his sessions, on Shakespeare’s world, he used images of such things as a cap, a fork, and a silver medal to bring Elizabethan theatre to life. But he ended with a picture of the Prince of Wales Museum in Mumbai (now, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya), where Shakespeare’s First Folio goes on exhibition this week. 

Then there was a little session in the smallest of JLF venues, where the archaeologist Barry Cunliffe explained his theory that the Celts developed not in Central Europe but along the Atlantic coast, and spread westward from there. As he led us through his reasoning, you were forced to reckon with the way that such assumptions about history change — and, again, realised that this wasn’t such a distant debate at all, since the ways that we can determine the origin and movements of the Indo-Europeans is a real, live, and intensely political issue in India today. That was a reminder that JLF, although an escape, isn’t about escapism. Like reading a book you weren’t prepared for, it can force you to revisit your preconceptions, and look at your existing problems differently. Whatever the antecedents and histories of some of its participants, that means it is, by definition, a liberal place with a liberal purpose. It is, I suppose, still a little bit of the India we would want to build, even if it has people in it we cannot ever agree with. 

I said earlier that we are sadly, sinfully distant from the India we would like to be. But, every year, for a few days in January, I see crowds of young people sit attentively through sessions on distant peoples and cultures. Perhaps all is not yet lost. Every year, I return from JLF with my hope in the possibility of that India a little renewed.