Ayesha Jalal at the session ‘The Pity of Partition’. — Photos courtesy of JLF The content of JLF 2016 was spectacular and varied, as expected. Dalrymple is a historian and Namita Gokhale, co-director of the festival, is a persistent campaigner for Indian writers, who are writing in languages other than English, to get their due. So naturally the sessions involving history and Indian language writers were spot on. History talks at the festival involved not just larger sweeping themes but also insightful microscopic ones — such as the conversation between Anabel Loyd, Timothy Minto (great-grandson of Indian viceroy Gilbert Minto) and journalist Pragya Tiwari on the journals of Vicereine Mary Minto (Gilbert’s wife).
Connected with Indian languages, the two most compelling sessions were one by Dhruba Jyoti Borah, Sitanshu Yashaschandra, Anita Agnihotri, K. Satchidanandan and Vivek Shanbag — debating whether 24 Indian languages represent any sort of unity in Indian literature — and another broader one on poets and freedom of speech by Salil Tripathi, Ashok Vajpeyi, Nirupama Dutt and Nilanjana Roy (Vajpeyi and Dutt being here was especially significant because non-English Indian writers and poets have been at the forefront of India’s free speech protests since last year).
The conversations espoused by JLF cannot be neatly summed up with understated themes. Some sessions revolved around broad subjects of global import such as economics (Thomas Piketty, Arvind Subramanian, Sebastian Mallaby, Mihir Sharma), history (Irving Finkel, Cyprian Broodbank), art (Caroline Vout, Vidya Dehejia), feminism (Abeer Y. Hoque and Mona Eltahawy), sports (Suresh Menon, Anil Kumble, Baichung Bhutia), medicine (Atul Gawande, Gavin Francis, Aarathi Prasad), poetry and politics.
But there were also relatively narrower topics: war photography (Don McCullin), dance, spies (Ben Macintyre and Raghu Karnad on Kim Philby), the Middle East, concentration camps (the session with artist Molly Crabapple and academic Laleh Khalili presented a different and interesting lens), modernity (Shobhaa De, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Christophe Jaffrelot, Ravikant and Pragya Tiwari), journalism, Pakistan (‘The Pakistan Paradox, ‘The Pity of Partition’, ‘Temples in Pakistan), environment, wildlife, caste and many, many more.
With six sessions going on simultaneously, and three of these — on average — being ones you would not like to miss, it is quite evident what JLF intends to do. The festival is not just about the sessions you will manage to attend; it really is also about the great number of sessions you will invariably miss. It is about the feeling of knowing you really wanted to hear Subramanian tell you about the works of fiction you must read to understand economics, but you had to choose to listen to Israeli novelist David Grossman instead. It is this feeling — of knowing that there are far too many ideas and books in the world to be crammed into five days — that will make you look up the session (thankfully most of them are archived online) and then look up the books Subramanian speaks about.
In this way JLF avoids trying to be the last word on literature. It settles for being a potential starting point to many thoughts. But let’s stay with this thought of the last word for a moment. For not all surprises at the festival are pleasant ones. JLF 2016 ended with a debate, as it always does — this one on free speech. Anupam Kher was a part of the debate, arguing that free speech isn’t absolute and unconditional. Some months ago, having been booed at a literature festival in Mumbai for referring to the current time as a golden age in Indian politics, Kher had called the audience a “paid audience”. This time round, Kher had tweeted about the fact that he would be at JLF and had given a press conference and bytes before the debate.
Moments before the event, the grounds witnessed a sudden influx of people. An unpaid audience appeared to have arrived. An audience that, in due course, proved to be a far cry from the by-and-large understanding and accepting crowds the venue had played host to for the past five days. They cheered at every punchline of Kher’s, including one in which he used an expletive (b------) to demonstrate, apparently, that this isn’t used at home usually, so it shouldn’t be used in public or in art either (context be damned). When a speaker from the other side — Aam Aadmi Party politician Kapil Mishra — spoke, he was met with united cries of “Modi! Modi!”
When a vote was called for to decide the winning side of the debate, Kher’s side won. This was how one of India’s best literature festivals, a spawning ground for so many ideas, ended. But there is solace in knowing it will be back again next year. With many more ideas, hopefully, and many more words.
The writer is a Delhi-based columnist and an associate partner at the new media company Oijo.