Jaipur Literature Festival had more books, less controversy

There was a time, not so long ago, when the Jaipur Literature Festival was a magnet for controversy. Somebody would say, or threaten to say, something controversial and the assembled press would ensure that it would be front-page news. For that matter, given the number of media professionals assembled on the press terrace at Diggi Palace, the festival venue, even relatively uncontroversial remarks could and were spun into headline-grabbing statements. This year’s iteration of the Festival, however, was largely free of such incident. It is true that the advertising executive, poet and current chief of the Central Board of Film Certification, Prasoon Joshi, cancelled his trip to the festival in the wake of protests surrounding the release of the Sanjay Leela Bhansali movie Padmaavat. But that was not, in any real sense, a festival-related controversy. That controversy was being driven from elsewhere; and, when that is taken out of the equation, the eleventh edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival was, from a news point of view, a relatively quiet affair. 

This is as it should be. In some sense, a maturity has crept in to both the festival and the coverage of it in the national media. It occupies a particular space in India’s national conversation, and its right to occupy that space is generally unquestioned. It has been criticised in the past for supposedly compromising with political forces and with the general anti-free-speech climate in the country. But in the course of dealing with these pressures it has also managed to carve out a niche for itself, in which it is understood that people on stage at the festival will speak their minds, even about matters that the sponsors might be sensitive about. This year, the festival was sponsored by Zee, but that did not stop some speakers from freely discussing the state of the Indian news media. One panelist, the Dalit Indian-American writer Sujatha Gidla, openly criticised leaders like Mahatma Gandhi — but, again, it seemed almost understood that the festival was the sort of location where such statements could and would be made. Certainly, there was no dearth of criticism (or support) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for one. While the broader free-speech climate in India may not be anything to write home about, and may indeed have worsened in recent years, it is worth noting that the Jaipur Literature Festival, at least, seems to have achieved some sort of stability when it comes to issues of speech and expression. 

Which leaves the real reason for the existence of the festival, books and their authors. There were the usual celebrity authors in attendance — the film actress Soha Ali Khan, for example, who has written a memoir, and who delighted thrill-seekers by arriving with her mother, Sharmila Tagore — but the emphasis was, as always, on writers whom many had not heard of. The most popular author at the festival was, perhaps, the Canadian-Indian poet Rupi Kaur, whose fame began with her posts on the social network Instagram. She went on to write two best-selling collections of poetry that had clearly struck a chord with younger people in India; her sessions were among the most crowded at the festival. Even in this case the festival played its customary role of broadening people’s approach to literature: many older attendees had not heard of Ms Kaur earlier, and were struck by her connection to the throngs of school- and college-going young people who made up the majority of the festival audience. And, of course, there were sessions on the Indian economy, on the Koreas, on 18th-century art history, on automation, on China, and on the craft of investigative journalism. All were attended; most questions from younger members of the audience were relevant and thoughtful. The maturing of the Jaipur Literature Festival, in its second decade, is well under way.