Jaipur Literary Festival 2011

First thing, right up top, you should know about this post, before you read any further, is that I did not attend this year's Jaipur Literary Festival. In fact, I have never attended any of its past editions (is that the right word?). But, yes, I have been to Jaipur once, in winter, to attend a wedding, and what I have so far read and heard about the festival, to my own mind, given my experience with Jaipur, I feel qualified to write a few lines about it (and modesty be damned, certainly hold an opinion on it and give it an expression).

The literary festival at Jaipur has acquired a sheen of glamor over the years. It has become kind of a literary Cannes or Sundance, never mind the drumbeats and the bhangra. This year was special as one of my favourite writers, J M Coetzee, attended the festival. I have always associated him with the unglamorous side of the writerly life, the savouring of which is the true mark of a writer, a ceaseless media-shy literary warrior committed to inconspicuous consumption, a monk among the literary cheerleaders and exhibitionists. Now that he has broken my heart by appearing in public (I take consolation in the fact that he refused Q&As, declined interviews and read aloud only a short story in public, and thank God, did not smile even once) in Jaipur, my only hope now, this side of the Atlantic, remains in Aravind Adiga. But I read sometime ago that he had appeared in a lit fest in England (perhaps it was a lapse of judgment on this great writer's part). It seems there is no hope for me. I am running out of models and ideals who will not cave in to the pressures of the market or the temptations of taking a little jump in the puddle of celebrity. Ah, I know you are already pointing me toward J D Salinger and Thomas Pynchon but the problem is that my battered freighter is yet to reach one of the harbours of the New World.

That is one big reason, if you ask me, why I go back to the dead writers: Joyce, Kafka, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Dostoevsky. They can't come back from the dead to claim their share of the limelight under the neem tree (isn't that good news for the fame-seeking new writers?). Interred, far from the madding crowd, they are comfortable with their solitude and do not suffer from nervous breakdowns if denied the regular supply of the Ecstasy of the mass media. I go to them and drink in their company and learn to nurture my solitude from them and as advised by Rilke, look deep inside me (often to find an unfathomable shallowness, which I plumb with my artistic compass, resulting in a feeling of inadequacy and melancholy and many more unspeakable weaknesses that are ready to slip off my tongue like uncontrollable snakes).

So, to go back to the beginning (you can see I have the habit of running ahead of myself), the drumbeats of Jaipur Lit Fest reached my ears in Singapore. One of the discordant notes came from Hartosh Singh Bal who accused Sir William Dalrymple, of the hyphenated White-Mughals (the hyphen is mine), one of the festival's organisers, of acting like a burra sahib and enthusiastically collecting specimens of white writers for the festival, making Indians suffer from a colonial hangover even after 60 years of British colonial rule. What an injustice! Why should an Englishman be an arbiter of Indian literature at Jaipur? That was the complaint, and it implied that Indian writers still needed the patting and recognition from their erstwhile white masters to get into serious literary play in the akhada of literature. The gentlemen that he is, Sir Dalrymple, got back to his accuser by saying that the plaintiff was indulging in a well-known but less coveted sport of reverse-racism. “That piece felt little more than the literary equivalent of pouring shit through an immigrant’s letterbox,” Dalrymple said. Sir Dalrymple is ever so eloquent, don't you wonder?

In my opinion, both Sir and Singh have a point. Though I have great regard for Sir Dalrymple (we Indians have a great talent for veneration and we are always in search of demi-gods to applause and worship), perhaps he does not grasp the bigger picture of what is going on here. As Malcolm Bradbury wrote in one of his essays, the British society was tooled up, so to speak, for empire-building. The building has stopped and the Britisher has no real place to exercise his talent. After the British empire ceased to exist (now it is restricted to seeking lost glory in organising the Commonwealth games and bestowing Commmonwealth awards), the immediate vacuum in the British society was filled with the need to thrash up the former subjects -- on the British soil. It did not result in anything salubrious, except that it gave us Hanif Kureishi. This reminds me of the churning of the primordial elements, the heavens and the earth, that gave rise to Adam and Eve. Nature has this old habit of creating something beautiful, and mind you, irreverent, out of chaos.

The reverse of what Bardbury has said is also true, which escaped the attention of Mr. Singh. The Indian society, especially the Indian middle class, was tooled up, so to speak, for empire-worshiping (I don't have to remind you of Macaulay's words, Mr. Singh, do I?). The empire is not there anymore, so the only place an educated Indian can bow his head is in front of the offsprings of the empire-builders. So, actually, both need each other to grow culturally, unless you want more Chetan Bhagats in India (no offense to Mr. Bhagat--I haven't read you any deeply than I have read Mark Twain or Faulker; so, you are in great company; therefore, please do not think of suing me).

Other interesting notes from the festival came from Coetzee, (yeah, what do you expect? I am a fan), and Orhan Pamuk. They spoke for writers writing in languages other than English and how they are often neglected by publishers and readers (and unless they win Nobel Prizes, they aren't even invited to festivals like Jaipur Lit Fest). My heart always beats for those who are unjustly neglected. So, Coetzee and Pamuk score big in my book for what they said in Jaipur.

Also, in his column, C P Surendran, complained of drunkards going around bashing poets and novelists, on minor excuses such as asking a lighter from a Sikh man. To him, I will say, take heart Mr Surendran. A time may come when gentlemen in the festival will shake off their pants altogether. Then we would know that Indian literature has overtaken British writing for good, and that the empire has struck its final, deathly blow.

In future, I am sure Japipur lit fest will grow and grow. My only worry is that with the kind of tamasha going around it, it also attracts wrong kind of people. Or maybe the festivalwalls should call it the Jaipur Cultural Festival. Then you can invite the qawwals and bhajan singers and body builders and their like to celebrate the cultural contribution of Bollywood song writers and cook book queens and dietitians; this should go well alongside the readings of and dialogues with eminent writers like Chimamanda Adichie and Junot Diaz.

The Death of the Indian Dream

In a brief essay on India, Aravind Adiga gets into the heart of the matter:

... The 300 million or so Indians living in acute poverty are being crushed by inflation. If they thought washing the floors, driving the cars and cleaning the windows of the middle class would open the doors to a better life, they know now that they were wrong. With prices rising, their savings are being eaten away. Higher food and fuel prices are being driven by big changes in the global economy that look set to continue. Even the most cheerful optimist in the past decade has seen the huge divide between the haves and have-nots, but the hope has persisted that it would somehow go away. Inflation has set like cement into that divide, solidifying the gap between the two Indias. The future for the country is two futures: rosy and grim. Indian companies will buy more foreign businesses and more Indian children will starve. In economic terms, India has become neither the U.S. nor Sudan, but something in between — a Latin American republic with an entrenched class chasm. Higher levels of crime and social unrest are almost certain to follow. For years or decades to come, we will not be able to talk of one destiny for all the people of the country.

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The education of Aravind Adiga

Aravind Adiga on his growing up years in Mangalore (The Independent):

... my grandfather, an Indian nationalist, disdained to speak English, except to correct another man's.

He was a prominent local lawyer who dressed in hand-spun cloth (as Gandhi had), spoke only the local language, Kannada, and scorned anything "Western". Except for the one occasion when he had come out of his law office to chide me, in precise English ("You cannot 'put a gate'"), I had never heard him speak the language. My other grandfather, a surgeon in Madras, belonged to the opposite school of thought, once refusing to attend an official dinner in honor of the president of India, Zail Singh, on the grounds that the president's English was inadequate.

Such debates were dead for my generation. What my grandparents called the King's English, I call Nehru's English. The prime minister's great speeches in English – the "tryst with destiny" oration delivered on India's independence in 1947, or "the light has gone out of our lives," to announce Gandhi's death to the nation the next year – were taught in school, quoted on radio, and their fragments were found, like DNA strands, in all newspapers and magazines.

Nehru could only have made these speeches in English, because had he spoken in Hindi, we – in the south of India, where Hindi is not spoken, and is often abhorred – would not have understood him. Every foundational document of India was known to me only in English: the Constitution, for instance, and even Gandhi's autobiography, written in his native Gujarati, but taught in school in an English translation.

How could we function without our only common language? Doing away with English seemed to me tantamount to doing away with India: We were the language's, before the language was ours.

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Review: Between the Assassinations

Book Review

Between the Assassinations
by Aravind Adiga
Picador, 2009

When I finished reading the last story from Aravind Adiga’s Between the Assassinations, I was briefly filled with sadness. This was the book I was reading for the past several weeks. I had been dipping in and out of Kittur, sharing the anger and sorrows, hopes and joys of its various inhabitants. Adiga’s imaginary town and its curious inhabitants had kept me enthralled for days on end. I read the book whenever time (and my daughter) allowed me to enter its world: on the way to office, during lunch break, watching over my daughter in the playground or before going to bed.

As I read the last page of the novel (or collection of short stories or does it matter?), I had to say good bye to the people of Kittur, without hoping to know what would happen to them next. In the last story Salt Market Village, Murali the communist and one-time story writer, gets up from the bed with a jerk at the end of the story. What will happen to him? Will he find a bride and happiness, at the end of a wasted life? Will Ratnakar Shetty, the fake sexologist, be able to collect enough dowry to see his daughters married off (The Sultan’s Battery)? Will the mosquito man cum driver George and his sister Maria find shelter in the unfinished cathedral, a symbol of their incomplete, hopeless lives (The Cathedral of our Lady of Valencia)? Will Gururaj, journalist and truth seeker, get back his sanity (Angel Talkies)? There are far too many characters to enlist here. But I cared about most of them. Because they spoke to me.

I spent some time with these characters, on the pages of this wonderful book, and they seemed to me so real that I began to worry about them.

Honestly, I had felt this way after a long time. Maybe I had felt this way after reading the stories of Manto and Krishen Chander (in Urdu) but that was more than a decade ago. I had read many short story collections in the past few months and years: Kunal Basu’s My Japanese Wife, Yiyun Li’s A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, John Cheever’s Collected Stories, just to mention a few (not counting the innumerable stories well-crafted pieces in The New Yorker and The Paris Review). Even Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Interpreter of Melodies. They were touching, they were literary, some stories were even fluffy and velvety. But none had an impact on me the same way that Between the Assassinations had.

On a different level, perhaps strangely, my reaction to the book reminded me of my reaction to Homicide. I had felt sad after having finished watching the entire series of Homicide (on DVD). The stories, the characters, their dilemmas and tribulations, get into the rhythm of your life, you begin to care about them. That was a series. This was a book. Yet I felt affected in a similar way. I was going to miss something. Even though temporarily, it was going to happen. There is a beautiful word in Urdu, khalish, to describe this emotion. I know I am going to feel this khalish, this ache, at least for sometime.

Why is it so? What kind of stories does Adiga tells in this book? Who are these characters that affect me so much?

Most of the characters in the novel come from the margins of society, well, some kind of margin. Low caste, high caste, rich, poor, Hindu, Muslim, Christian—all with their own set of issues, problems, limitations and horrors.

What’s so new about them, one might ask. That’s true. There is nothing new about them. Perhaps these characters have existed in India’s rich vernacular literature for decades but their avatar in Indian writing in English is what’s new. Perhaps we had seen them in some form earlier, in towns such as Malgudi. But in the wake of big advances and biger hype, they had stopped walking our book’s pages.

In the past, when Indian writers like Khushwant Singh (The Mark of Vishnu) or K A Abbas attempted to describe the life of the poor and the dispossessed, their views and voices often came from an exalted position (that’s my impression). Their intimacy with the subject seemed to be contrived (Moreover between then and now, circumstances in India have changed).

Not in Adiga’s case. It is the sensibility, the intimate approach with which Adiga unravels his characters and lets us peep into their inner world—of their thoughts, hopes and humiliations—that makes us feel for the characters. There is an economy in his style which is subservient to a generous vision. Whether you read about the humiliations of a low caste student or a high caste cook, Adiga takes you so close to their skin that you feel you had made a journey into their soul. That too in a language that can look deceptively simple but in fact is rich, masculine and powerful.

How many contemporary novelists or story writers can make us feel this way? Beneath their velvety language, all you might find empty notions of how the lives of others could be. Or painstaking research and history couched in beautiful language. That style has its own uses but let us not go there. In Adiga’s case, you find the real dirt of India, the ugliness of life and society that thwarts the aspirations of millions of Indians. Adiga speaks for them. He had given voice to India’s poor and voiceless but with a dignity that is often denied to them.

Adiga’s language is measured, masculine and powerful. He does not dwell on much description, keeps a sufficiently fast pace for the stories but once in a while his eye catches something (in the background) else and he goes after it. There are many examples:

“Even at this hour of the night, work was still going on. He heard a low, continuous sound, as if it were the audible respiration of the night world: an open-back truck was collecting mud, probably for some construction site. The driver was asleep at the wheel, and his arm was sticking out of one window, and his feet out the other one; as if ghosts were doing the work, morsels of mud came flying into the truck from behind…” (Angel Talkies).

“A dozen women in colourful saris, each with a green or mauve bandana around her head, were cutting the grass from the sides of the road. Swaying in concert as they sang strange Tamil songs, the migrant workers were down in the gutters, where they scraped the moss, and pulled the weeds out from between the stones with violent tugs, while others scooped out handfuls of black gunk from the bottom of the gutters, which they heaped up in dripping mounds.” (The Cathedral of our Lady of Valencia)

What kind of stories are these? Let me reference it to the last story in the book, Salt Market Village. Murali, a Brahmin and a graduate of Madras University, used to write stories (but never got published) before he abandoned them and became a card carrying member of the Communist Part of India (Marxist-Maoist), Kittur. He is in his 50s now but twenty five years ago, he used to roam the villages with a notepad, dreaming of becoming an Indian Maupassant. He sent his compilation of stories under a nom de plume—‘The Seeker of Justice’—to the editor of a weekly magazine in Mysore. A week later, the editor summons him for an interview.

The editor asks him who his favourite writer is? Maupassant, after Karl Marx, he replies.

“Let’s stick to literature,” the editor retorted. “Every character in Maupassant is like this…” he bent his index finger, and wiggled it. “He wants, and wants, and wants. To the last days of his life, he wants. Money. Women. Fame. More women. More money. More fame. Your characters—“ he unbent his finger “want absolutely nothing. They simply walk though accurately described village settings, and have deep thought….That’s it.”

“They do have thought of changing the world for the better…” Murali protested. “They desire a better society.”

“They want nothing!” the editor shouted. “I can’t print stories of people who want nothing!”

He threw the bundle of short stories back at Murali.

Perhaps the bundle was picked up by Adiga. And daringly, he rewrote those stories and sent them for publication. The result is a pounding piece of harmonized anger, a precise and humane account of people, whose small truths make a staggering reality that is India today. But unfortunately an India that is rarely written about, its unglamorous existence not considered being worthy of a mention. India’s middle class is so huge and so hued that in itself it constitutes a world and its mirror—and most of the IWE caters to the problems and hopes of this narcissistic class of people. Arvind Adiga is a chronicler of the world that is beyond the pale of this self-consumed middle class.

But the book is not without its weak moments. All the stories are not that sparkling. The Cool-Water Well Junction is reminiscent of Slumdog Millionaire (nothing extraordinary here), the story of Jayamma in Valencia (To the first Cross) is predictable in its conclusion, the point of the story Bajpe is lost on me, Ziauddin in The Train Station seems to be a confused character.

Despite these flawed tales, Adiga’s Kittur is a fascinating town with charming people. People who want something in life. There is a drive in these stories’ characters that one can’t resist. Maybe Kittur is the new Malgudi.

There are very few books that I become attached too. Very very few. I can count them on my fingers. Between the Assassinations has joined that rank. It can gladly stay on my shelf, next to Manto, Krishen Chander, Naipaul, Kafka and Carver. And I don’t give a damn what others have to say about it. It’s my book shelf.

PS: Is it a novel? Maybe yes, it is. Kittur is the protagonist here. If you have a problem with that, call it a collection of short stories. The common factor is that it is all happening in a small town in South India, Kittur.

Aravind Adiga on Sri Lanka's own war on terror

"The world has issued the Sri Lankan government a blank check in its fight against the LTTE, and it is time now to tear up that check," says journalist and novelist Aravind Adiga, the bestselling author of The White Tiger, which won the 2008 Man Booker Prize.

In a powerful essay in The Daily Beast (theirs is the only general daily e-newsletter I subscribe to), Aravind takes the Sri Lankan govt to task for its war on terror (against LTTE) and the butchery of innocent Tamil civilians in the process:

One of the world's oldest, best-organized, and nastiest terrorist groups is about to be wiped out in Sri Lanka. This sounds like good news, but the world may soon discover that the elimination of this particular terrorist group came at a terrible price. Indeed, in so many ways, what is happening in Sri Lanka—this small, sunny, and incredibly beautiful nation—seems like a perfect libertarian's nightmare of what can go wrong in a war on terror.

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