FESTIVAL NOISE
Last month I was at the Jaipur Literature Festival .
Sanjoy Roy one of its hosts strode on the stage in the front lawn to inaugurate it.
SANJOY1: Good morning. Who would have imagined that 19 years ago two individuals William Dalrymple and Namita Gokhale would come together with us at Teamwork Arts to create what has become one of the world’s largest literary gatherings. APPLAUSE
No surprise I was happy to have my new book launch there. That came with its own drama and fanfare.
BOOK LAUNCH
Jaipur is the biggest of India’s literary festivals. The queen mother of sorts. But its only one of about 100.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata and later last month I was at the Exide Kolkata Literary Meet.
There I found, in her only appearance in India, the American novelist Barbara Kingsolver talking about how Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield became her Damon Copperhead.
BK1: I don’t know where else this came from if it didn’t come from the ghost of Charles Dickens. He said let the child tell the story.
In fact Kolkata in just one month hosted three literature festivals and a gigantic book fair. 320,000 people visited it.
But a recent article in The Guardian has resulted in a war of words. Literally. It wondered if literary festivals are really about books or spectacles offering music, dance, handicrafts, a carnival where the book is often the background not the main event.
That’s unsurprisingly upset lit fest organizers and book publishers. Ananth Padmanabhan, the CEO of Harper Collins in India said the spectacle is the strategy not the problem.
The Guardian article quotes a publisher as saying for all the hoopla the average book in English sells only 3-4000 copies. But English is not the only game in town. Padmanabhan says the Malayalam novel Ram c/o Anandhi has sold 300,000 copies.
On the other hand an article in the newspaper Indian Express opined a literature festival is not for readers,. Its for people who wish to be seen as readers.
Both sides have a point. But I have seen snaking queues of people standing in dripping unseasonal rain, waiting patiently for their books to be signed by Amitav Ghosh. This year the Kolkata Literary Meet pulled off a literary coup of sorts.
It brought two of the best known Indian American novelists around, Booker winner Kiran Desai and Pulitzer winner Jhumpa Lahiri, on one stage. Lahiri sharing her feelings about bad reviews
JL1: There was a mean review and I remember going to my husbands office and weeping on his couch. Feeling so hurt someone had said mean things.
And Desai adding her two cents.
KD1: I live alone and work alone. So if I read something horrible I would just be myself dealing with it.
It reminded us that lit fests are not just for selling books. At their best they are also about unexpected conversations, a glimpse into the minds of writers. It was standing room only. There was actually almost no room to stand, the session was so packed.
I think what rankled most about the article was it stated baldly India does not have a great book reading tradition. That people lined their studies with bound copies of Readers Digests as if they were literary heavyweights.
Except that’s not true. There IS a tradition of reading books. At one time books were routine as wedding gifts in Bengali households. At the Goa Lit Fest, cartoonist Alexis was on stage launching a cartoon celebrating the festival. And he asked the audience to raise a toast to his father. Not a literary man at all.
ALEX: He never read books but never prevented me. A very simple man. Say hello to him.
Books have always been seen as a way to selfhood. Now in a world of smartphones, we have plenty of other attractions competing for our attention. We don’t read less. We just read fewer books. Even I do and as a writer that feels shameful.
Then I stumbled upon the Instagram handle of a woman in a small town in Bengal. Like many instagrammers “life of puja” chronicles her daily life - cooking on a clay stove, chopping vegetables, washing clothes three times a day. Her English has a Bengali accent but she does not care about that as she talks about books like Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns
PP1: The more I read it the more It broke my heart into pieces.
But what lifted MY heart was behind her stacked on the floor, are towers of books, perhaps some two hundred books.
Books still matter in the lifeofpujaa. And mine.
This is Sandip Roy in Kolkata for KALW