Litfests, the pros and cons

How literary festivals can become priceless

Every January, a discreet but still ferocious war breaks out between those who love occasions such as the Jaipur Literature Festival and those who have the same cordial relationship with literary festivals that the talented Mr Ripley displayed towards potential victims. One side swears, a shade misty-eyed, by the camaraderie of litfests, the friendships that spring up between writers and readers. They point out that, in the early 2000s, no one could have predicted the rush of book love and book hunger that has seen thousands of readers return year after year not just to the mother ship, JLF, but to literary festivals across the country from Chennai to Kolkata to Shillong. They speak lyrically of how these festivals are one of the few remaining platforms where writers can express themselves with (some) freedom, and where Indian writers in English share a platform not just with writers from abroad but with their counterparts in other Indian languages.

The other side eyes literary festivals with cold suspicion. Some purists argue that the job of writers is to stay at home, writing, and that the litfest phenomenon has turned authors and poets into extras lobbying for bit parts on the great argumentative Indian tamasha known as "television". Some point out that the sessions at litfests that draw the most crowds are the ones that feature cricketers, politicians, film stars, wannabe-Oprah television stars (and the real Ms Winfrey). They ask whether the hordes of students waving their autograph books at writers will actually read, let alone buy, books. And some critics manage a double-edged grumble, complaining that the media only covers Indian litfests for the controversies - and then complaining in slow years that there is nothing to report, when writers insist on behaving themselves.

Both sides are right. The litfest phenomenon hasn't translated into more support for writers in the way of residencies, creative writing courses or larger research grants; nor has it stemmed the churn in bookshops or led to philanthropists cunningly investing in new libraries in order to reap the harvest of even more readers a decade down the line. But the side that is pro-festival is a little more right than the other. Literary festivals (by some counts, there are over 70 of them in India today) wield soft power; at their best, they become a sort of SCZ, a Special Creative Zone, an incubator for the persuasive power of ideas that are too radical or too quiet to find space in the hard either-or dynamic of television or print media debates. It was in these spaces over the past year that readers stood to honour the silenced writer Perumal Murugan, to remember the scholarship of the murdered M M Kalburgi, to hope that some day the rational atheism of a Narendra Dabholkar or the investigative curiosity of a Jagendra Singh, would not lead to the snuffing out of their lives.

And for writers, litfests have a special importance. For them, they provide the particular ambition that accompanies seeing some of the best writers in India and the world discuss their craft and what writing means to them. It is not always an ambition for fame, or wealth, or celebrity. It can be seen to dawn on the faces of younger writers, as they listen to the Atwoods, the Toibins, and the Karnads and decide that, some day, they will write with as much pleasure, as much power and as much unshakeable integrity in their work. If the big tents of literary festivals yielded only this gift, they would still be priceless.