Nothing fires up the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) more than a good controversy. “Shame,” shouted a group of protesters carrying placards at audience members and poets, gathered for a session on poetry and imagination for the festival’s London edition at the city’s Southbank Centre. Then they listed out Vedanta’s ‘crimes’.

One protester followed it up with, “You all love Modi.”

There is reason to suppose that JLF Southbank, held as a part of the Southbank Centre’s festival of South Asian culture called Alchemy, draws in at least a few NRI (non-resident Indian) Modi fans too. This may explain the quizzical frowns on the faces of some audience members who seemed to be struggling to fathom — for a moment — whether the last bit was an affirmation of their love, or its derision.

The debate over the colour of Vedanta money, indeed the colour of most big corporate money, is wider and more serious than a report on a literature festival is capable of addressing. But here are some quick observations. Vedanta is a company accused of grave human rights abuses in different countries. Activists as well as some writers protested its sponsoring of JLF Southbank and exhorted speakers to boycott the festival. One speaker did, reportedly. I didn’t see Vedanta’s name on any banner or poster during the event. Protesters were allowed to raise slogans and voice their dissent in between sessions and offered a mike to engage with audience members which, apparently, they didn’t accept. The level of outrage seems to indicate that, instead of “whitewashing Vedanta’s crimes” as has been alleged by protesters, JLF Southbank, if unwittingly, has been turned by the same protesters into a platform for bringing charges against Vedanta into greater focus than before.

JLF Southbank was a pared-down affair this year

Now, back to the event itself. JLF in Jaipur has played host to many a controversy, from Salman Rushdie not being allowed to speak, even on Skype, to, more recently, Anupam Kher holding forth on free speech before boisterous supporters. It could be said that this paradoxical feeling of a festival that is on edge, but at the same time at the centre of a pressing discourse — that the parent festival is no stranger to — was missing from its foreign editions.

This time round, JLF Southbank was full of the nervous energy that accompanies controversy. Speakers seemed just a bit more charged than in JLF Southbank 2015, and volunteers just a bit more wary and on their toes. This was perhaps exacerbated by the fact that the festival was held over a day (instead of two days, as was the case last year) with more sessions scheduled to take place simultaneously.

The sessions ranged from ones on history to journalism to politics to translations to women in literature to art.

“We have not taken money,” Jerry Pinto, novelist, clarified after the protesters at the session on poetry were done. “We have our own ways of protest. We shouldn’t be ashamed if our ways are different from yours.”

Writer and poet Ruth Padel, after openly denouncing practices such as Vedanta’s on stage, read an unpublished poem. An excerpt:

“ … Some split-off
floating island will appear to carry us
away
from Planet Wildfire, degrading seas
and forests, a global population
which depends on energy we are
shrivelling
the earth to make, the difference
between ruin,
which we can rebuild, and rubble
which we can’t… ”

“What Vedanta is doing in Orissa amounts to the ‘rubble we can’t’,” she said to me, to be quoted, after.

Pinto went on after this into a session on writing fiction linked closely to reality and experiences with Bangladeshi writer Tahmima Anam and journalist Pragya Tiwari. How can one best use dialogue and dialect in one’s work (Pinto, especially, in his Em and the Big Hoom)? Or recreate a history one has not lived (Anam, in her Bengal trilogy)? Is it possible to write about painful personal memories, yet distance oneself enough to make these ‘palatable’ for readers? Such questions, and more, were discussed.

A panel by Sunil Khilnani and William Dalrymple on the former’s project comprising 50 Indian historical biographies was a repeat from this year’s JLF at Jaipur, available on video on the site. Yet practice, perhaps, enabled the historians to put up a riveting show, full of one-liners. For instance, when Dalrymple said, “Another figure demoted by you was Ashoka. Short, fat and very bad skin. A bit of a lens breaker.”

Writers live by words and stories. Throwaway one-liners and casually told tales, both on stage and off them, are what make a literature festival tick. “Partition was an unseen dinner guest every day,” said Navtej Sarna, diplomat and writer in a panel on Partition, moderated by writer Salil Tripathi, also with Anam, literary historian Rakhshanda Jalil and singer and musician Amrit Kaur Lohia, who ended the session with a song.

There was Anam’s recounting of the time an elderly lady came up to her at a book fair in Dhaka and said, “Aren’t you ashamed? You wrote your book in English. What would your grandfather say?” And, from Pinto on his process — “Writing a novel is like building a bridge and walking it at the same time”.

A panel titled ‘British Asians: The Changing Face’, with Mukulika Banerjee, Sathnam Sanghera, Yasmin Khan and Patrick French, was packed with Londoners. Hilarious and shocking at once, is Padel’s story, off-stage, of a letter she received from David Cameron during London’s mayoral elections which Sadiq Khan won. The conservatives had mistaken Padel for a ‘Patel’, and delivered a polarising, if veiled, campaign pitch to her doorstep.

Every talk I attended was full with Londoners of South Asian descent, but others too. Sadly, this edition of JLF Southbank too, as the last one, was marked by an absence of Pakistani voices which may have lent the festival greater diversity, as would have writers from Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan.

A blockbuster panel, towards the end of the day, was titled ‘Democracy at Work’, with Swapan Dasgupta, Banerjee, John Eliott, Salman Khurshid and Tiwari seated from right to left. “To the extreme right we have Swapan Dasgupta,” Tiwari began. Everyone, except Khurshid (to be subjected to much grilling on Congress’s poor performance in recent state polls) laughed.

Other notable sessions included those on women writing war (Shrabani Basu, Alex Von Tunzelmann, Yasmin Khan and Sidin Vadukut), Barkha Dutt, Andrew Whitehead, Dean Nelson and John Eliott on reporting in India and a quaint one on the depiction of the tiger in the artistic treasures of Tipu Sultan by Susan Stronge and William Dalrymple. Also a relevant, if motley, panel called ‘Against the Grain’ (of media pressure and mass opinion): Dutt, Tripathi, Gideon Levy and Shatrughan Sinha.

JLF Southbank ended with a talk on ‘Ideas of India’, with Banerjee, Tiwari, Dasgupta, Khurshid, Jalil and Malvika Singh. The strongest thread in that conversation was one on dissent, and engagement. About India being incapable of being a homogenous idea. About there being one underlying principle that holds the nation, as any nation, together. That we will agree to converse. That we will agree to disagree. That we may not all be writers, but we will respect the value of words.

The writer is a Delhi-based journalist and associate partner at the new media company Oijo.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, May 29th, 2016