News television's power awes and appalls us all. After all, it is news TV that helped create the Aam Aadmi Party, a political force that was universally underestimated till it became the government in Delhi and proceeded to behave as if it was the opposition. It is news TV that runs our foreign policy, scuttling peace with Pakistan and enabling hostilities with China. And it is news TV that has taken over the way that Indians talk today when they're put in front of a microphone.
This year, the Jaipur Literature Festival began a bit of a fight-back. Too half-hearted for my taste, but at least it was there. After all, JLF has been something of a victim of news TV in the past. Almost every year in the past few years there have been what are cheerfully called "controversies" by the electronic media (all stories these days are classified as one of two types, "scams" and "controversies", but usually are actually neither). It reached the point where it became a salutary example of how our news culture actually operates: put a bunch of creative people accustomed to thinking out loud together with a bunch of half-employed journalists eager to justify their little paid holiday to their editors, and "controversies" emerge from nowhere.
This year, the panels at Jaipur were different. There were far fewer big-picture "9 pm"-type discussions in which India's Big Problems were dissected and solved. There were fewer big names from the Bombay film industry. There were many fewer intellectual provocateurs, like Ashis Nandy, who has never chosen an illuminating metaphor if an offensive one was available. Instead, we got many more subject experts who'd learned over years how to capture audiences who knew nothing, and JLF benefited vastly from that choice.
Mary Beard, for example, the charismatic classics scholar who told a startled audience that her university, Oxford, had almost added Sanskrit to its famous "greats" course in Latin and Greek in the 1930s. (So much for Macaulay.) Or S R Faruqi, the man who wrote a great Urdu novel and then translated it himself into the great English novel The Mirror of Beauty, bemoaning the hold of "poetic prose" on Urdu writers, who, he said, became "third-rate poets, instead of novelists". Or Alex Watson, a Sanskritist from Harvard who told an amazed audience that 30 million Sanskrit documents were in existence, most of them untranslated, many mouldering without even being looked at for centuries. Or Rana Dasgupta, arguing that the crassness of Delhi's Punjabi culture was the product of Post-Partition Stress Disorder. Or George Michell, who has spent a lifetime in Vijayanagar, tearing with polite distaste into V S Naipaul's typically unobservant and untrustworthy rewriting of the history of its fall, the centrepiece of A Wounded Civilisation. Or Gloria Steinem, the star of the festival, and the one who delivered the best line: "You don't get democracy outside the home until you get democracy inside the home."
Mary Beard, for example, the charismatic classics scholar who told a startled audience that her university, Oxford, had almost added Sanskrit to its famous "greats" course in Latin and Greek in the 1930s. (So much for Macaulay.) Or S R Faruqi, the man who wrote a great Urdu novel and then translated it himself into the great English novel The Mirror of Beauty, bemoaning the hold of "poetic prose" on Urdu writers, who, he said, became "third-rate poets, instead of novelists". Or Alex Watson, a Sanskritist from Harvard who told an amazed audience that 30 million Sanskrit documents were in existence, most of them untranslated, many mouldering without even being looked at for centuries. Or Rana Dasgupta, arguing that the crassness of Delhi's Punjabi culture was the product of Post-Partition Stress Disorder. Or George Michell, who has spent a lifetime in Vijayanagar, tearing with polite distaste into V S Naipaul's typically unobservant and untrustworthy rewriting of the history of its fall, the centrepiece of A Wounded Civilisation. Or Gloria Steinem, the star of the festival, and the one who delivered the best line: "You don't get democracy outside the home until you get democracy inside the home."
This made for a better, more intimate and less "headline-y" session -- a transformation aided by the weather, which turned unseasonably rainy on the last day and drove the sessions indoors, into crowded, hushed rooms where the boundaries between audience and panel began to blur. The crowds responded eagerly. Sessions about abstruse ideas -- Pompeii, the spice trade, the world wars -- were followed by a deluge of relatively sensible questions, some from schoolchildren. Javed Akhtar's session looked deserted compared to Rana Dasgupta's riveting conversation with William Dalrymple across the driveway. I stood at the back of a fascinating session on postcolonial writing featuring Burmese and Sri Lankan writers behind half a dozen kids Googling "postcolonial" on their smartphones. (And thus, no doubt, several promising careers will be lost to academic hell.) That, certainly, is JLF's core competence, a function it performs with exquisite attention to detail year after year and -- we discovered -- come rain and come shine.
Not all the changes this year were completely positive, perhaps. Continuing the postcolonial theme, here's something that Harsh Mander, the activist and member of the National Advisory Council, told me. He said he had been coming for many years and he felt that, perhaps, there were more Anglo-American writers relative to those from Africa and Asia this year than in previous years. Perhaps that was because the American Centre and the British Council were major sponsors, helping pay for the flight tickets for authors from those countries (and Amartya Sen, in the US' case). But, perhaps, JLF was slightly diminished as a result.
And finally, to come around full circle to another place where the malign influence of news TV lingers, there was the question of moderation. All things in moderation, and moderation in all things, it was said, an Aristotelian dictum that applies in full to JLF. A moderator can make or break a session; they can turn a fascinating writer into a bore, or transform a dreary panel something of wonder. Over-preparation is a curse: it can cause writers to retreat into their shells, half-terrified that the moderator remembers their book better than they do; it can birth leading questions that even the most loquacious writer is forced to answer wth a "Yes" or a "No". TV-style under-preparation is a more familiar sin: it can allow the most aggressive member of a panel to hold forth excessively; and it can reduce even the clearest of topics to an indigestible mush of cliche and assertion. The best moderators are those, perhaps, who don't have to read anything to prepare because they already know a reasonable BIT about the writer's work -- but not enough that the audience feels left out. Finding them for panels that are about subjects as unusual as the sort that JLF promised this year? Ah, there's the problem.
Every year, people who have never been to JLF come and are, very simply, flummoxed that something like it exists. I met a friend from Mumbai, one of the smartest people I knew in College, who bitterly regretted having never come before. I met an old friend from Calcutta who complained bitterly about changes from a few years earlier and then dropped her voice to say: "but the panels were way better, na?" I struck up a conversation with an elderly Canadian couple who said that they had three days in Rajasthan, had meant to spend the first morning at the Festival and then wander around, but instead left Diggi Palace only to eat and sleep. In a country with a noisy, unperceptive discourse that's been bent out of shape by the power of news TV, JLF's importance grows every year. Even on the cloudy, misty last day, when the bright awnings bent under the weight of rain and the neat pathways between Diggi's lawns turned into mud, the arches and laughing schoolchildren, the glimpses of crowded rooms with rapt faces and snatches of conversation over chai about Italian painters and Samuel Coleridge reminded me how much of a privilege it is to step into this enchanted circle. A privilege all the more precious in that it is free.
mihir.sharma@bsmail.in
