The Zee Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) came to Houston, Texas for the first time in September and it was an epiphany. I had missed the opportunity to go to the main Jaipur festival — which I understand drew half a million attendees last year (Asia’s own literary Woodstock!), with two thirds of the people under 21 — when my novel Karachi Raj came out, so this was all the more meaningful to me. Having long been a denizen of book festivals, as is true of any writer, let me say that I have experienced nothing quite like JLF’s enthusiastic spirit. JLF is a great omen for culture in that part of the world, and by extension everywhere else, too, because of the relentless globalisation of writing.

Namita Gokhale, festival director, and Sanjoy K. Roy, festival producer, came from India — JLF goes next to New York and then to Boulder, Colorado — as did 13 members of Teamwork Arts, the festival producers, including such lovely young people as Anubhav Tyagi and Sukhman Khera, along with more veteran producers such as Suraj Dhingra and Sharupa Dutta and many others of equal exuberance, whom I had been corresponding with by email and got to meet for the first time.

Living as I do in a country where young people are often jaded and have few thoughts in their heads about what’s going on in the world and why, if the people I met at JLF are typical of the new India then the world had better watch out! There is something very liberating about watching the emergence of a self-possessed youth who seem to have moved past the hang-ups of past generations, and I wish I could observe that in person in India and in the rest of South Asia.

When one encounters the warmth and open-mindedness of the people who represent JLF, abstract arguments about neo-liberalism or empire or racial stigmata give way to an assurance which, to an American steeped in the discourse of perpetual decline and even unravelling, is quite energising. Shashi Tharoor, the diplomat/writer/parliamentarian, is well-known, of course, and he was in Houston, but meeting the wonderful Indian consul general, Anupam Ray, and the extremely well-spoken Indian ambassador, Navtej Sarna, particularly at the closing reception held at India House, was a revelation in terms of the pride they obviously feel in India’s future. I think, by comparison, of the perpetual nihilistic self-doubt typical of Pakistanis, because of obvious reasons, and the contrast couldn’t be sharper.

This belief in the people’s destiny was what struck me again and again in individual conversations. And it appears in the whole idea of JLF, and the kinds of open-ended discourse it seems to generate. When one listens to JLF debates over such fraught issues as cultural appropriation or the post-truth society, there seems more flexibility and pragmatism about such notions than in the heart of the empire, where dire personal consequences are often associated with the stances a writer takes in public. Or does not take in public. American writers, in their native environs, are reluctant to say anything very interesting or threatening, afraid of immediate censorship and attack by aggrieved parties. As a result, book festivals in America have become quite dull and few writers enjoy being part of such boring rituals.

But not JLF, where writers are made to feel special, with a palpable sense that unrestricted discussion of crucial ideas about where our world is going is all that matters. To have this occur at the gorgeous new Asia Society Centre (among the two loveliest buildings in Houston) provided an infusion of energy that a diverse city such as Houston desperately needs, in order to transcend the rising parochialism which seems to have become a feature of major American cities despite the apparent glamour.

Writers can self-promote and engage in dialogue, but are they able to let go of fears and anxieties, and get to a point where they show something of themselves that touches the audience — which really amounts to lending an additional dimension to books in publication, the whole point of public appearances? I suggest that only an atmosphere of pride in the writing vocation, which JLF provides in abundance, with its energetic team of professionals looking after writers, can allow such active collaboration between writer and reader, extending beyond the homilies one has gotten so used to hearing in the American setting.

I was honoured to moderate the first panel at JLF Houston with three innovative fiction writers: Shobha Rao (whose story collection An Unrestored Woman describes the trauma of Partition for women), Rajesh Parameswaran (whose collection I Am An Executioner subtly interrogates the tropes of Indian immigrant writing) and Daniel Peña (whose novel Bang examines the harrowing consequences of the drug war in the Mexico-US borderlands). I prefaced the session with what I felt were some necessary remarks about the globalisation of literature being the most important development in publishing as far as I am concerned, and how the work of these three writers, each of whom proceeds from a certain baseline of aesthetic security, illustrates a restless surge against borders, walls and partitions, when the real world does not warrant such separations.

Later in the day, Omar El Akkad, whose prophetic novel American War dramatises a second American civil war toward the end of the current century, talked to me and Zimbabwean novelist Novuyo Rosa Tshuma about home, belonging, nostalgia and memory, in a way that made me open up, to an extent I haven’t before, about my sense of being no longer master of my own fate: a realism I don’t think should be interpreted as weakness in a time of great political turbulence.

JLF is something new, special, magical. Writers are to be valued not for what they do to comfort and console us, but for the irresolvable challenges they bring. Readers are part of the equation not as passive consumers, but as active collaborators. Ideas are all-important, the space where they are exchanged is sacred and nothing is as important as lack of fear of reprisals, and a curiosity that might lead anywhere. I saw more than enough of these values in practice for me to become a believer.

The columnist is a novelist, poet and critic, and author of Literary Writing in the 21st Century: Conversations

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, September 30th, 2018