Waheeda Rehman at the Jaipur Literature Festival.

V.S. Naipaul at the Jaipur Literature Festival. —Photos courtesy Jaipur Literature Festival

By RISHI MAJUMDER

IT was raining at the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) on Jan 22. At the entrance to Diggi Palace — a haveli built in 1727 when Maharaja Jai Singh II shifted his capital from Amber to Jaipur, now a hotel — stood Suhel Seth, an Indian marketing strategy consultant famous for being able to exemplify like no one else that classic Delhi idiom: he is known because he is seen. Seth held a black umbrella with a dapper white border. He wore a perplexed expression.

Inside Diggi, the world’s largest free-for-all-to-attend literature festival began to look like a flood had hit the town circus. People sidestepped slush and puddles to flock to insufficient shelters, such as colourful cloth canopies and shamianas designed originally to be shelters from the sun. Wiser ones, such as Seth, stuck to their umbrellas.

One of these, an old-fashioned black one, was held over yesteryear Hindi film star Waheeda Rehman who seemed, in this unexpected avatar, one upper lip tremble away from Nargis, another heroine who had, with Raj Kapoor, immortalised the black umbrella in the 1955 movie Shree 420. Following her were co-panelists Nasreen Munni Kabir and Arshia Sattar, and an entourage of Jaipur Literature Festival volunteers. Their talk was packed to the point of bursting, as was every talk. The most popular panels had been planned on vast open grounds that the rain made unusable so panelists and audiences were fitted into smaller but sheltered venues which had other JLF sessions scheduled already. Hence each session was shortened by nearly half, giving viewers the unique experience, for the brief time in which it rained on Jan 22, of being able to watch JLF on fast-forward.

But chaos offers insight sometimes. Some people may insist, for instance, that a literature festival comprises primarily writers or writers in waiting, readers or readers in waiting and their interactions. But standing back, as chaos demands you do, may present a different picture: that a literature festival, like any festival, is made up of seemingly mundane moments.

Ask anyone what they remember from the JLF past and present and they are unlikely to launch immediately into the nuances of that Richard Dawkins talk on the absence of god, however fascinating it may have been. There will, instead, be memories of known faces, such as Rehman, wading through a crowd wearing a frown that has come to characterise her beauty as much as her smile, or Seth, stranded momentarily by a calamity he cannot figure how to make social capital out of. Or The New Yorker editor David Remnick raising an eyebrow at being interrupted by a cow’s loud bellow in the middle of a panel in 2012 (“The cow agrees,” he recovered quickly to say), or math and science writer Simon Singh projecting a news report on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s claim of plastic surgery in ancient India on a screen — to illustrate an apathy towards science — referring to him only as “a very important person”. And who can forget the simply sad moments, such as a visibly unwell V.S. Naipaul being prompted by his wife Nadira to “laugh” at a joke cracked by Ram Jethmalani. Such snapshots, one-liners and gifs from real time, embedded in memory, make JLF tick.

To put in place a factory for such moments, a ‘Make In India’ of memories, you need to herd a disparate set of people into the same space. The more disparate the people, the greater their number, the more likely it will be that the JLF will live on in individual memory. To catalyse this equation ensure a fair share of writers. This is an equation built out of words.

This year the JLF, in its press release, claims to have played host to 245,000 visitors from 50 countries other than India: for instance, sessions with V.S. Naipaul and former Indian president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam reportedly drew audiences of over 5,000 each. The festival saw the participation of over 300 authors and 140 musicians: among those present were Paul Theroux; Booker winner Eleanor Catton; novelists Sarah Waters, Eimear McBride, Kamila Shamsie, Alberto Manguel and Amit Chaudhuri; fiction and non-fiction writer Nicholson Baker; humorist Will Self; and poets Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Vijay Seshadri and Ashok Vajpeyi. Other prominent personalities from various fields such as Infosys founder Narayana Murthy, academic Jonathan Gil Harris, Sanskrit theoretician Sheldon Pollock and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, were also spotted. The list goes on and appears endless.

If the number and range of its speakers is at the heart of the festival’s success, a careful curation of who will talk to whom, and on what, constitutes its mind. There were murmurs of the JLF not having as many ‘star writers’ this year compared to previous ones but sessions from jazz to cricket to the science of improbability to Sri Lanka, maths, science, Nepal, the bumblebee, history, the classics, war, tigers and pop fiction left the audience not just spoilt for choice but often befuddled by too much of it. Such panels had as panelists not just those directly involved with the subject in hand (having authored books on it or worked in the field) but also tangentially (journalists somewhat in the know) for an outsider’s take.

The one thing this JLF did miss was controversy. There was no Salman Rushdie due to come in on Skype with religious groups protesting. No Ashis Nandy making provocative statements on caste and corruption. Instead, there was the hint of controversy, like the hint of rain. It didn’t actually rain for the remainder of the festival but the sky remained overcast, leaving audience and panelists alike longing for a couple of hours of unbridled sunlight.

This has been the first JLF after an election year that saw a dramatic change of government in India and this was evident as you had members of the prime minister’s new planning body on development policy, Niti Ayog, on the panels. This made for very interesting interactions: economist Arvind Panagraiya, vice-chairman Niti Ayog, went so far as to irately tell journalist Om Thanvi, when the latter put forward uncomfortable questions on state policy, “If you’re asking a question give me the reply as well. What is the solution?” Thanvi submitted, humbly, that asking questions is a journalist’s job and that if he had a “solution” he would have been the economist — not the other way round.

The last panel, a debate on whether ‘Culture is the New Politics’, saw a new JLF face: Rajiv Malhotra who founded the Infinity Foundation famous for its focus on Hinduism studies. One of his reasons for being there seemed to be that he had badgered festival co-director William Dalrymple for the longest time on Twitter.

But hope emerged from unlikely quarters: a young girl, for instance, got up to ask journalist Ashok Malik earnestly whether the Science of Uncertainty could be used to determine Modi’s involvement in the 2002 Gujarat riots; audience members repeated Thanvi’s concerns about faulty policymaking when the time for questions arose; and there were some who grilled Malhotra on his ‘Hinduism studies’ ideas. At such times the sun shone a little.