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It’s nearly 4,000 miles from Karachi’s Beach Luxury Hotel — home to the Karachi Literary Festival — to London’s Southbank Centre, but the organisers managed the transition smoothly and seemingly without a hiccup on May 20.

Also read: The Karachi Literature Festival heads to London to celebrate Pakistan's 70th birthday

The literary event has become a popular fixture on Karachi’s cultural calendar, and on its most recent iteration, drew a hundred thousand visitors over three days. Much of the credit goes to the Pakistani branch of the Oxford University Press that has been the driving force behind the KLF. In London, Bloomsbury Pakistan was their local partner.

A possible reason for its popularity is that it doesn’t charge for entry, so families turn the event into a genuine festival, with children flocking to their own special events. People amble into talks, and walk into another one if they get bored. The mood is laid back, and part of the fun is in socialising with friends you bump into.

At Southbank, however, the KLF was hosted by Alchemy — a body dedicated to bringing in cultural events from South Asia — and was more tightly run. Events began and ended pretty much on time, and the largely expatriate audience participated actively in the proceedings. However, the Pakistani High Commissioner clearly didn’t have a good time. Seated on the dais next to Mohammed Hanif, the keynote speaker, he was reduced to playing with his cell phone as the satirical author of The Case of the Exploding Mangoes tore into Pakistan’s dictators, and savaged the country’s intelligence agencies for their role in ‘disappearing’ journalists, dissidents and bloggers. At the end of his speech, the High Commissioner was the only one who didn’t applaud. One could only feel sorry for him as clearly, he didn’t want to be reported by the Pakistani spooks who must have been in the audience.

Lessons for next time

One problem with the festival was that there were too many speakers and themes on the over-ambitious programme, and not enough time to effectively cover all the topics. This forced the organisers to stuff too much into each session, thus forcing compromises and pressure to compress complex ideas into sound bites. And as several sessions were held simultaneously, there were difficult choices to make.

In the panel discussion on 'Blaming the Elite: Class, Greed and Gender', for example, we had a young leftist academic, Taimur Rahman, giving a succinct and sharply focused talk about Pakistan’s class conflict and divisions, while Moni Mohsin and HM Naqvi read from their respective novels. All three were fascinating in their own way, but the discussion did not mesh together as there were few commonalities in their treatment. And gender-related issues weren’t even discussed.

One potentially riveting subject on the programme was 'Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: Diaspora Pakistanis Caught in the Brexit Hate-Storm'. Although the strong panel included Ziauddin Sardar, Farooq Bajwa and Iftikhar Malik, the discussion rarely focused on the Islamophobia that raised its ugly head after last year’s Brexit referendum. And nor was the elephant in the room discussed as panelists and the audience skirted around the issue of integration by Muslim migrants. In retrospect, this topic takes on special urgency after the recent Manchester suicide bombing. The fact that home-grown young Muslims can slaughter children in the country that gave their parents refuge has appalled millions in the UK and elsewhere. Surely these aspects of the migrant experience deserved closer scrutiny than they received.

'Against All Odds: The Price of Prosperity in Pakistan Today' had another group of heavyweights including Maleeha Lodhi (Pakistan’s current ambassador to the UN); Shuja Nawaz (author of Crossed Swords, a comprehensive book on the Pakistan army); Ishrat Hussain (ex-governor of the State Bank of Pakistan); and Victoria Schofield (author of numerous books on Pakistan and Kashmir). While all the speakers — with the exception of Nawaz — patted Pakistan on the back for continuing to function when many around the world had written it off as a failed state, they didn’t get to grips with what had pushed it to the brink in the first place.

All in all, having over sixty speakers in a single day produces its own problems. While the logistical ones of organising the event were overcome, it was clearly difficult to examine serious themes in any depth. This was a case of ambition overtaking the time available to achieve far too much in a single day.

Perhaps more serious is the tendency at many literary festivals to include a range of subjects from politics to economics to sociology. Straying far from prose and poetry, such events pull in journalists and academics who have specialised in a wide array of subjects. While these speakers may add intellectual heft to the proceedings, creative writing is pushed to the margins. This is especially true of the Karachi Literary Festival where, over the years, the programme has come to be dominated by columnists, ex-diplomats and academics.

In part, this is because of the welcoming space provided by an annual event in a city that has acquired a reputation for criminal, sectarian and ethnic violence. Here, OUP Pakistan deserves great credit for making this event a regular feature on Karachi’s cultural landscape, and one looked forward to with lively anticipation by thousands of Karachiites starved of intellectual stimulus.

The fact that the KLF has provided the inspiration for other cities to hold their own literary festivals reveals the hunger many Pakistanis have for meaningful discussion and debate far removed from the rubbish they are fed by our TV channels. And the crowds that flock to these events attest to a creative, vibrant society that is far from being a failed state.

Ironically, at the same time the KLF was staging its multiple sessions at the Southbank Centre, the Jaipur Literary Festival was being held at the British Library. If this kind of mobile celebration of the written and spoken word becomes a trend, we could be in for a movable feast of ideas.

Originally published in Dawn, May 29th, 2017