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There’s a story Ruskin Bond tells the audience that is illustrative of just how things have changed in the world of publishing, currently spearheaded in the subcontinent by the likes of his interlocutor this morning, Ravi Singh of Penguin India.

Ruskin Bond (right) reads, on being seduced by an older woman

He tells us of how he goes to a bookstore, and just like any young author might, looks for his books. He finds a copy of one, alas, tucked into the bottom of a pile of books. Sneakily, he slips it out and places it on the top of the pile. But the owner of the store has seen him. Not recognising Bond, he takes the book and pushes it back under, remarking, “Yeh nahi chalta.” (This doesn’t sell). “To teach him a lesson,” says Bond, “I bought the book myself.” And how much did said book cost? Three rupees.

In those days before literature festivals and publicity tours, if we are to take Ruskin Bond at his word, the author didn’t really write for an audience. You just sat in a room and wrote. Of course, writers are no longer faceless individuals. Perhaps this is why JM Coetzee, who gives the impression of someone who only wishes to express himself through his work, was so eagerly anticipated at the festival.

JM Coetzee holds the Jaipur audience in thrall with a reading

Coetzee, a spare, upright, white haired white man of 70, could not have appeared more different from last year’s Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, an expansive, big haired, grandfatherly black man whose booming baritone mesmerised a similar audience. But for forty-five minutes, reading from ‘Elizabeth Costello’ in his precise, measured tones, Coetzee achieved the same effect on the Front Lawns of the festival venue (where even standing space was at a premium).

The chapter read out by Coetzee tells of a professor visiting his elderly mother, a writer, in a remote village in Spain. Here she lives with numerous feral cats, and the ‘village idiot’ Pablo, both of which she stubbornly dedicates herself to. The son tries to understand, somewhat fumblingly, what his mother means by this. They speak of faces (do cats have them?), souls (if a cat has a soul, does it have qualities?), the concept of choice, and whether life was a birthright as much as for Pablo as  for the cats who multiply incessantly. Layers upon layers, in unblinking, limpid prose: you could not ask for more of a novelist.

And what of philosophy, beloved and daunting? Following Coetzee’s meditative reading, AC Grayling’s ‘secular sermon’ sought to dispel the fear of seeking answers to ‘what is’ and ‘what matters’. This quest, for Grayling, is a responsibility if we are to live better lives, and make use of the third of the 1000-odd months that are available to us for serious living, learning, and loving. Further, if we are to be able to have “the degree of latitude with which to seek the ethical”, we need individual autonomy and freedom of expression. Authoritarians across the world well fear the Graylings of our age, because the sword has no chance against pens wielded with such passionate, articulate intelligence.

AC Grayling (left) fields a question

The Nepali contingent gets down to business

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Eschewing the more obvious themes presented by headliner sessions such as ‘Why Books Matter’ (with Patrick French, Kiran Desai et al), I followed a friend into ‘Cinema Bhojpuri’. His claim that Nepali directors were responsible for much of the resurgence in the Bhojpuri film industry in Bihar and elsewhere was an intriguing one, and I seized on the chance to explore something new.

Sian Zahoor holds the Jaipur night captive

Our focus on multiplex releases, be it Hollywood, Bollywood or Kollywood, means regional productions alien to our own cultural milieux too often pass under the scanner. With 500 movies produced in the seven years to 2009,  however, Cinema Bhojpuri is not to be ignored. Avijit Ghosh, in describing the Bihar he grew up in himself, hinted at the earthy nature of the films viewed in ramshackle theatres where the “tin roofs were hotter than Helen”, in a Patna where (according to co-speaker Sharmila Kantha), “there are no secret places for lovers.” It is only now, they implied, that Bihar’s growth has allowed its incipient film industry to capitalise on a population that can afford to watch movies regularly.

Moving on to ‘Strangers in the Mist’, a discussion on the Indian Northeast’s gloomier prospects, one couldn’t help but reflect on the pitfalls inherent in a state’s dealings with ethnic communities. With 220 ethnic groups making up a population of 40 million – “an anthropologist’s delight, and an administrator’s nightmare” – according to panelist Sanjoy Hazarika, the Northeast is an example of how not to ‘do’ federal Nepal.

Here, the literary qualities of what was read out was perhaps secondary to the truth itself. But the tragedy is not only in the truth of massacres, rapes and disappearances. It lies in the fact the young novelists like Assam’s Aruni Kashyap can only write about violence, because they have “never known what it is like not to live under the shadow of a gun”. The success of Indian democracy, he concluded, “is that it has managed to create apathy amongst urban populations towards the plight of those in rural areas.”
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Next up was the BBC’s live recording of The Forum, with our own Manjushree Thapa debating how to be

Manjushree Thapa reflects on the good life

‘good’ in the modern world with Gurcharan Das and Kaveri Nambisan. The session raised interesting questions on the difficulties of sculpting one’s own modern, practical morality. But through design or chance, it appeared prepackaged for a London audience, with each panelist alloted a certain role. While Nambisan, a doctor, spoke of her struggles to connect with the poor even as she is privy to their sufferings, Das spoke (sometimes eloquently) of the importance of ‘dharma’ in furnishing moral guidance. Thapa herself chose to elaborate on how Buddhism has simplified this quest for her, though as for most of us, it’s easier to be good at work than at life for the very simple reason that you can get fired at work. These aphoristic nuggets of Eastern wisdom notwithstanding, the BBC would have been unprepared for the outburst from a young man during question time: “You come here to ask Indians about dharma, ok?…you know nothing, ok? Indians rule the world, ok!”

I missed Thapa’s session on ‘Imaginary Homelands’, which followed immediately after another of the fesival’s ghee-drenched luncheons. But it was a busy day for the Nepali delegates, with Narayan Wagle and Sujeev Shakya part of the session ‘Fractious borders; the ups & downs of Himalayan relationships’. The absence of the Bhutanese and Afghani speakers diminished the regional span of the debate that ensued, but perhaps this allowed for more in-depth discussions into the fraught Nepal-India relationship with Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao (with occasional diversions to include Pakistani author Shehryay Fazli). Rao was careful not to be controversial, but when Wagle noted the Nepali perception that their country was ‘India-locked’, she couldn’t help but reply, “India holds the key”. Audience members were quick to respond: “All South Asian nations should hold a masterkey!” The question that remained unanswered by the end, however, was whether South Asia really is a Europe in the making. Rao concluded, “South Asia needs to grow up.”
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The evening belonged to HM Naqvi, the Pakistani author of ‘Home Boys’; he was declared winner of the first DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. Fifty thousand dollars the better for it, he bid adieu to days of back-o-cabinet scroungings for pasta.

And we converged, too, a little worn, still buzzing, to the performances lined up for the evening. If the starting poetry on offer seemed anaemic, with a beer at hand, Madan Gopal Singh’s fusionistic Sufi melodies (featured in Kathmandu last year) were a balm. The soul settled, Pakistani sufi singer Sian Zahoor, all wrinkles, rings and gold sequins, roused us into ripples of blissful turbulence to the tunes of ‘Allah Hu’.

Madan Gopal Singh reprises the music he brought to Kathmandu last year

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Jaipur seems bigger and more anonymous every time I return. The Jaipur Literature Festival, too, is

Rajasthani welcome to the Jaipur Literature Festival

growing by the year, with over 100 sessions spread over four venues  and five days in the sprawling grounds of the Diggi Palace Hotel. More authors, more books, more readers! And if crowd crush may be an inconvenience at sessions with marquee authors such as Orhan Pamuk, Vikram Seth, Martin Amis, Kiran Desai and Junot Diaz – with tens of thousands swarming the fest on the weekend – and if some attendees appear to care more about style than substance, the essence of such a gathering remains, to quote opening speaker Karan Singh:

“Prose is written to be read

Poetry is written to be heard”

The passion for both forms is what ties the diverse Jaipur audiences together. Shabdabrahma – the divine word – awaits you, quoth Singh, and we were ready to be beguiled.

Keynote speaker Sheldon Pollock was not one to rest on the approbation of this generalised love of literature, however. Professing to dismay at discovering that he was the only student of Old Kannada in Bangalore when he began his exploration of subcontinental classics, Pollock lamented the Silent Spring of regional languages across India. What is to be done, a question that could apply equally to the scores of languages across Nepal? What can be done not just to preserve the older, variegated forms of these ways of communicating, but to preserve our access to these “other ways of being”?

New prizes, institutions and libraries dedicated to regional languages are a way of keeping alive the hope that in 100 years, said Pollock, our railway station stands will not only stock Cineblitz and Shobha De, but also the classical languages. Because when we are lost to these other ways of being, who are we going to ask?

The gods are living in heaven

And we live on earth

Who is to say which is better, wondered Pollock:

The taste of poetry

Or the elixir of immortality?

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(Om Puri is following me around. When I sat down to write this on Day 2, he was right behind me, pretending to be enjoying the Rajasthani folk-rock band post-lunch. Moving on, I met the Nepali contingent – a mixture of journos, writers, and booksellers – on the Front Lawns. A heaving mass fresh from an adhoc session with Javed Akhtar and Gulzar was giving way to another mass homing into ‘Imaginary Homelands’, featuring Junot Diaz and Manjushree Thapa. I excused myself to get back to work and who takes a seat at the next table? Om Puri and his wife. A last glimpse before he was mobbed by students, doubtless staged to impress me, then it was down to brass tacks.)

Om Puri shares a quiet moment with friends

So much happened on the first day. Barring the installation of an unreliable give-and-take among friends attending different sessions, there is only so much one can write about. One ends up with a fairly arbitrary thread to offer readers; the joy of such a festival is that almost everyone’s experience is unique.

But most of the early arrivees would have turned up to hear Orhan Pamuk, author of ‘Snow’ and ‘My name is Red’, expound on the themes of cultural change in the context of Turkey. His accented, rather mechanical sounding English belied an acid, self-deprecating humour, and a very clear sense of his mission as an author. For Pamuk, it is about ‘rewriting the past in such a way that it lives on in the minds of those in the street’. The patience one would imagine necessary to recreating the milieu of medieval Ottoman miniaturists, as in ‘My name is red’, wasn’t much in evidence come question time, though. Pamuk cut short his interlocutors in the audience, and was merciless with those with only praise, no questions.

“I really like your—“

“Yes, yes. Next question!”

Does a certain genius justify eccentricity or is it the latter that underpins the former? Junot Diaz’s foul-mouthed interjections and the mantra-like references to ‘dharma’ on the part of Gurcharan Das reminded me of sulky Hanif Kureishi from last year’s edition, when he simply refused to play while quizzed on the migrant experience. The audience, as ever, loved it.

The next two sessions, on Che and Mao respectively, were rather more straightforward. What is there, after all, that we don’t know about these twin giants of 20^th century communism? That one was an uncompromising hero who perished in the fire of his own ideals, the other a strategic genius whose ruthlessness laid the edifice on which modern China was built? It turns out, perhaps unsurprisingly, that there is much we still don’t know. Jon Lee Anderson’s access to Che’s widow, Aleida, guarantees insights into the man who was made a saint to further the violent causes of insurgencies across the world. But it is the painstaking research undertaken by Jung Chang (survivor of the Cultural Revolution and author of ‘Four Swans’) and her husband, Jon Halliday, that really tears into the legacy of the Mao still revered in China’s backyard.

“We knew he was bad,” intoned the elegant Chang, referring to the famine that killed 70 million and was a direct result of Mao’s policy of exporting food to buy arms, “but not that bad.” Halliday was particularly critical of Mao’s legacy (and those in western academia who still defend portions of it), dismissing the idea that Maoism was about a peasant’s revolution (“it was a military victory”), and that China’s economic growth can be attributed to Mao. “Mao is spent, there is nothing of interest in his Stalin-inspired writings,” declared Halliday. What would he think of our hidebound homegrown revolutionaries, I wondered?

Orhan Pamuk (right) on cultural change

Jung Chang (centre) and Jon Halliday (right) have a message for Mao's men

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 Day Zero A

I didn’t see any monkeys at Tribhuvan International Airport – the exiles from Pashupati have been an attraction of late for prospective flyees – but I did see the superlatively human Vikram Seth. Or someone like what he may have been decades ago when he snuck across the border with Tibet, down from Heaven Lake (the edition in my parent’s library depicting Phewa Lake instead). Clearly, I was raring to go to the Jaipur Literature Festival.

All such sentimentality vanished when Bikram-not-Vikram’s wife asked me if I could move from my right-side-of-the-plane window seat so the family three would not have to be separated by an aisle (as if they did not have the rest of their lives to spend together). Loth to give up views of the Himalaya, I refused. And what views!

Massif followed massif, and shocked as I was to see the bare, black southern face of Machapucchre, I wouldn’t have given up my seat for anyone at that point. I searched for familiar shapes and sizes in the rock and ice complexes looming above the clouds, and imagined, once we passed magnificent Annapurna and Dhaulagiri, that I could espy Kailash in the far distance. Bikram’s family snoozed by my side, oblivious in heaven’s wake.

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They say modern travel is a dislocation that deprives us of the organic transition in time and space that conventionally slow travel allows us, and thus of a real understanding of the connections between places. We jump on a plane and hey presto! step out into a reality that has no logical connection to what we have left behind. To fly up into the ether of mountains and valleys and descend into the flat patchwork of the Gangetic plains is clearly such a dislocation. But a bird’s eye view of the geological history of our continent is no mean bargain either. Looking down at the map of your world, you cannot but comprehend the connections in a more ancient fashion.

Day Zero B

Being generally disdainful of Delhi’s delights, it was a relief to to roost in the ‘new’ Tibetan refugee camp of Majnu ka Tilla. The stimulating chill of January lent a transient authenticity to the narrow streets of Free Tibet signs, DVD stores, stalls selling highland fare, thronged by monks, lay Tibetans, and the odd Nepali.

But there was no time to explore, with half the day given over to travelling by bus to Jaipur. Nursing a persistent hangover, I attempted to sleep through the cacophony of horn blares, ringtones, and heedless conversation. As the flyovers of Delhi gave way to endless mustard fields and then the semi-arid expanses of Rajasthan, there was time aplenty to consider the pithy condensations within Taleb’s The Bed of Procrustes. For here I was as a journalist of sorts, approaching a festival celebrating books. Taleb reviles one, and reveres the other; he finds only books sacred, and journalists so profane (along with economics, professors, and consultants) that he has to take a ritual bath after contact with them.

I decided I would shed my ill-fitting journo’s cape, all the better to work my way through the mystery of words.

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Jazzmandu’s flashed past once more, without last year’s dilemma of having to choose it over its cousin, the Himalayan Blues Festival. Even made it to Gokarna Jazz Bazaar for the first time in years, and what a change its higher profile has wrought. Last time around, it was more of a chillout in the chill than a real jazz fest, with Nepali bands modifying their bluesy tunes into ‘jazz jams’. This year, Alukomarai and Ari Hoenig proved Nepal’s a worthy destination for the grand tradition of jazz.

Not that the straight-up offerings of The Bug, the ethno experimentation of Indonesian outfit Simrik Dialog, and the fiery set from the Adrian d’Souza Quartet weren’t quite fine thank you, given the dreary rock sludge that washes over Thamel every weekend through the year. Alukomarai, however, were in a league of their own, plenty of thanks to incendiary Thai saxophonist Pharadon Phonamnuai and the sparring of the drummer and bassist. It boggled the mind that they were on so early, especially given Pharadon’s exploits with Vatchapuj in last year’s edition. Ari Hoenig, American drummer extraordinaire, charmed the crowd with his rendition (on drums, yes) of Resham Phiriri, but it was his absorbing domination over the grooves laid out by his bandmates that really impressed, in Gokarna and especially at the festival finale at Shangri-La last night, where a trip-hop spread (complete with Ari’s handcrafted reverb) had me over the moon. There’s something about improvisation with a percussionist, where, perhaps more than with any other instrument, you can get the sense of a talent lashing out in all directions…and making it work.

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Despite the distractions of Jazzmandu, I made my way to Patan Durbar Square before Tihar to catch the first evening of the Planet Nepal dhamaka, simply because there seemed to be a lot going on in this city of not much going on most of the time. Music, installations, films, roundtables, and all for a worthy cause. Scrolling through the website, I made a mental list of what-what warranted a closer look.

There was a lot going on that evening…rather too much. In the heaving crowds packing the templed thoroughfares, lighted by lurid coloured bulbs, one got the vibe of any other street fest in Kathmandu. Yes, people were having fun, jiving to Kutumba, but the installations seemed as lost as that friend I was supposed to meet by the side of Krishna Mandir, and the Patan Museum’s exhibitions were, after a point, closed off, even from one of the artists involved. It all seemed a little too chaotic to hang around trying to make sense of.

So I dropped by the Kathmandu Contemporary Arts Centre to catch the Planet Nepal exhibition the week after. It was worth the visit, if only to be able to examine all the works in peace, at ease, and give them their thoughtful due. What triggered the mood, of course, was the four-metre ‘Recycled Buddha’ upfront, remarkable in conception and execution. Artist Karl Knapp draws parallels between cyclical human existence as conceived in Buddhism and the re-used bags that make up his Buddha. For me, seeing the form of the Buddha covered in plastic bags triggered more unpleasant associations. Those references were to be seen in the video playing inside the cleanly designed exhibition hall that lamented the loss of rivers such as the Bishnumati, choked with effluent and plastic bags.

The rest of the space was very well laid out, with Ashmina Ranjit’s intriguing organic creations at one end, and Om Khatri’s contribution to the Rickshaw Project at the other. Just outside, a helpful young man operated Sujan Chitrakar’s Biscope (slide viewer), installed on the back of a bright yellow rickshaw structure. More depressing images of pollution in Kathmandu, the mood of which was echoed by the third rickshaw on display, Sajana Joshi’s insectile vehicle made of black tyre rubber.

If it’s rare to wholeheartedly appreciate one-man shows in the galleries in Kathmandu, perhaps such a composite exhibition is the way forward…I look forward to more such from KCAC’s excellent gallery.

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