The Fashion Show of Literature

<p><em>Business does the opposite: pervades at each and every aspect of our lives. Between idea and reality, to extend Eliot, falls a poisonous shadow: the shadow-marketing of literature&nbsp;</em><br />Manash Bhattacharjee Jaipur<br /><br />Perhaps I just want to exhibit activities which one can perform as a presentation of something, but without any higher meaning... A fashion show perhaps -- during which women speak sentences in their clothes. I want to be shallow.-- Elfriede Jelinek<br /><br />The Jaipur Literature Festival turned into a hot property with claimants battling over the original idea like desperate, new-age Adams fighting over who committed the original sin. The original sin of an original idea flowering itself into a hot property sums up a history larger than itself. Behind every property is a capitalist enterprise, and in this case too, the usual suspects among big business establishments are doing their entrepreneurial duty. The festival pays them advertorial service in return and no one minds it.<br /><br />International literature festivals cannot survive without capitalist help, because not only organisers but even writers need money. The rich clients of literature in turn are willing to pay for a literature show cocktailed with other pleasures. The circle of reason is complete, and as the festival rolls everyone has a ball. No harm in that kind of a thing, if profundity can come in lovely doses of shallowness. Why bother or pretend for more in a life-world which anyway doesn't offer anything more than what money can buy?&nbsp;<br /><br />In the same vein, one has to accept that literature too is sold and bought, in bookstores, book launches and literary festivals. If the world is a marketplace, even literature is a commodity. If the name of that commodity comes in the shape of originality, the relationship between money and imagination gets blurred.&nbsp;<br /><br />When Orhan Pamuk is speaking, we forget who is sponsoring the speech. We get hooked to what Pamuk is saying about love, language and identity. Our senses are triggered and our thoughts stirred. We forget the secret hand of capital profiting from our bourgeois love for literature as we forgetfully capitalise on the writer's inventiveness. We also invent ourselves in the process, floating from one world to another, like an audience which forgets they are also actors enacting roles on the festival's stage.&nbsp;<br />We become willing participants to be anonymous guinea pigs of literary experimentation.&nbsp;<br /><br />No harm in that, we think, if words can lift us and transform us into a space where we feel enlivened and enthralled, caressed by the angels and demons of our senses, provoked for a minute to wonder how can the world be so ugly despite so much beauty. Or other such perplexing gems. It is rare for someone to realise beauty behind ugliness and ugliness behind beauty.&nbsp;<br /><br />Pamuk's insightful ideas of life and the world can't be removed from the stage he speaks from, which neither belongs to him nor to us, his devoted, loving audience. There are people, who manage our relationship with Pamuk, so that the trembling relationship between a writer and his audience, between literature and the world, is mediated, tamed and its political edge obfuscated. In such a stage, literature gets consumed at the level of individual catharsis. But what catharsis leaves intact is business.&nbsp;<br /><br />Business does the opposite: pervades at each and every aspect of our lives. Between the idea and the reality, to extend Eliot, falls a poisonous shadow: the shadow-marketing of literature.&nbsp;<br /><br />When literature is marketed what is unavoidably celebrated is populism. So you have two mediocre British writers hogging the limelight in a way as if all other British writers or writers from other countries, are either dead, or refused to come, or less popular. It is an insult to Afghanistan when two British writers, who love patting each other's back, are chosen to hold a show of mutual nodding over critical questions regarding European presence in the beleaguered and exploited country. It is an insult to Indians when another British writer tells JM Coetzee that he was impressed by his ability to keep an Indian audience silent for 45 minutes.&nbsp;<br /><br />When everyone is happily grazing the friendly grass of literary camaraderie, no one is bothered about insults which don't even occur to us. In fashionable conversations where conservative politics masquerades as smart literature, the audience needs to forget their clothes and manners and get a little dirty to confront the muck. But people are too happy to bother being nasty. The spectre of politeness haunts their souls. The atmosphere gets ridden with eulogies.&nbsp;<br /><br />Of course, there were high points. Vinod Kumar Shukla's meditations on cinema and the changing relationship between poetry and prose. Coetzee's short story which weaved a tale around his intimate, critical dialogue with Christian theology and Jewish ethics. James Kelman's defiantly introspective and slang-English prose, countering English hegemony. Meena Kandasamy's earnest and sharp narrative on the Hindu plague of caste. These were poignant, reflective, political moments in an otherwise apolitical environment of festivity.<br /><br />The festivity itself was quite addictive. Drinks and conversations poured into each other. Lovely strangers all around, meaning no harm, like one of Kafka's prose pieces, thoroughly unsure of their place in the world, in the city, in the family. Lovely encounter with strangers who remind you of a naughty Amichai poem, where he tells you its best in an alien place to fall in love with a student of history. But we are also invited to forget the cost of beer and the crumbs of food stealing into your pocket. You remember fleetingly the ironies of <em>Hotel California</em>.&nbsp;<br /><br />In the marginal centres of such fateful and chance encounters, there are the less innocent encounters of the publishing industry, making deals, networking, wooing writers the way footballers are wooed every year in Kolkata, and now, cricketers are wooed/sold/bought/trashed in the IPL. Literature mimics sports.&nbsp;<br /><br />The crowd was more women, less men. I am yet to figure out the sociological, existential, or even literary clues behind that statistics. The music of such a gathering was in part remindful of <em>The Love Song of Alfred Prufrock.</em> The bottoms of trousers rolled and the name of Michelangelo can have grave repercussions.<br /><br />To end on a cautionary note: if the Jaipur Lit Fest is meant as a promotional event so far, then we have to get ready for a more sinister takeover of entry fees for the show in the future. As audiences, we shouldn't ever accept such a conspiracy. The huge benefits of a delegate pass and the relegated status of a participant's badge has to be bridged, not severed further. If this literature festival has plans to become more democratic and less elitist, let it show. On other political and ethical aspects, let's keep the debates alive.&nbsp;<br /><br /><em>The writer is a poet and scholar, living in Delhi</em></p>