As the plane made its descent into Chennai, I was thinking about a conversation I'd had with a writer with roots in that city, which I quote with her permission. She was planning to spend some time at the The Hindu's Lit For Life festival this weekend listening to writers and then to visit Jaipur later this week for the Jaipur Literature Festival.
She was looking forward to both festivals with keen anticipation. But, she asked, was she deluded - were all of us deluded? Did the busy-ness of Indian publishing, the 70-90 literary festivals said to be held each year, the ambition and the talent of this next generation of writers mean much in the face of the corrosive rot we saw all around us?
We both talked about The Hoot's comprehensive report on free speech in India in 2015, and what the findings meant: the killings of journalists and writers (10), the attacks (30), the number of people charged with sedition (35), hate speech cases (13).
The numbers in the brackets are not abstractions: each figure represents a grieving or fearful family, or stands for the emotional drain and financial expense of years in court, or speaks of the barrages of bullying and hatred unleashed against anyone perceived to be less than loyal to the state, its various representatives, or the ruling right-wing.
The rot is not restricted to any one political party or any part of India: for instance, the cut-outs of J Jayalalithaa on Chennai's roads were a useful reminder that of the 48 defamation suits logged by The Hoot in 2015, 11 were filed by the Tamil Nadu government. It is not just difficult to be a writer, or a practitioner of the performing arts, in India any more - the jaws of the offence laws threaten to snap shut on ordinary citizens, while anyone who speaks their mind on "sensitive" subjects is likely to be intimidated into silence by thin-skinned pseudo-patriots.
The year just past was one of the grimmest for free speech in India. While journalists from regional-language newspapers were the most vulnerable targets, a combination of bad laws, state interference and majoritarian bullying meant that, from students to newspapers in Nagaland to cartoonists and comedians, everyone is now a potential target.
The only categories of Indians who are safe from persecution are godmen, politicians and Internet trolls. And the only category of Indian writers who think that the present crisis is a media creation are - what a coincidence! - all Hindu male upper-caste writers, completely oblivious to the layers of privilege that swaddle their comfortable lives in a cocoon of safety.
Was it possible, my friend said, that literary festivals were little more than tiny, lonely islands, cut off from the churning in the subcontinent? I didn't disagree entirely. But, the day before Lit For Life started, what I was thinking of was not the writers but the audiences, the strange phenomenon of crowds swelling by the year, coming out not just for celebrity writers but for the poets and the translators, for the Colm Toibins, the Bamas and the Jhumpa Lahiris.
Am I romanticising this too much? Perhaps, but this slow swell of old and new readers, growing by the year at every successful litfest, is real. They buy books by the hundreds; many sit through a full day's worth of panels, and I wonder whether this speaks of a hunger for another kind of development, a growth that reaches beyond multi-storeyed buildings, malls and fast cars.
The Chennai book festival offered the usual variety of a well-organised litfest. It served as the public square where the city could honour the heroes who had worked tirelessly through the recent floods, and compare the disastrous and thoughtless version of development that had brought the floods down so hard on both Chennai and Srinagar. There were a few dud panels, sessions that meandered or turned into a bonfire of vanities. But these were outnumbered by the panels that reminded booklovers why you love reading - a session on Gopal Gandhi's light-filled translation of the Tirukkural, Colm Toibin's quiet exaltation of the beguiling virtues of boredom, panels on sensuality and erotic fiction that explained why it is so important to write, as well as read, for pleasure.
Somewhere in the melee of politics and selfies, I was caught between two sets of people - a group of students clustered around the bookstore, a group of authors at the foot of the stairs - both discussing the books they had loved reading the most. The groups were disparate, not aware that the same conversation was happening in the two separate circles of readers, that a person in each circle was saying, "But you have to read this" at exactly the same moment, that they suffered, joyously, from the same fever.
And I thought that it is so important, especially in times when writing - and living freely - is under siege, to be reminded not just of the figures in the brackets and what they represent. It is easy to forget how basic the freedoms now under siege are to our lives: the freedom to talk about everything you please, from wars and history to sex and caste, in the manner that you choose, to criticise the state or corporate groups or people in power when they are at fault, the freedom to read what you want, and to be whom you want to be.
Perhaps the best literary festivals in India pull off that twin feat: they keep the grim, growing numbers in mind, the authors silenced and exiled, journalists killed, citizens arrested, but they also remind us of what we are fighting for, and how ordinary, how precious, how necessary, it is.
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