The steady morning rain didn’t dampen the extraordinary spirit of the 2015 Jaipur Literature Festival on Day 2, even though some sessions were cut short and there was a bit of initial confusion around rescheduling.
There were moments that grabbed me. Right at the beginning of the day, moderator Arshia Sattar posed this question to the panelists of “Matters of Faith”: How does our personal faith affect our work? Does it open up the creative process? Or does it close it?
Alberto Manguel, another writer I have discovered during this festival, responded: “I am agnostic. My faith is poetic. My faith is in the written word. I believe that we are redeemed by words. If words don’t make us more intelligent, more powerful, words can definitely make us conscious. They can console us.”
Manguel, I learned later at a different panel titled “The Library at Night”, used to read aloud to Jorge Luis Borges as a teenager in Buenos Aires. A Canadian, Manguel now lives in a small village in France where he has assembled a library of nearly 35,000 books. In an ideal world, he said, he would invite Diderot for dinner because he used to be a tremendous reader. He chose to skip Plato, because Plato apparently wrote and recorded a lot more than he read.
Another wonderful moment was when 76-year-old veteran actress Waheeda Rahman was invited to converse with her biographer. Aaj Phir Jeene Ki Tamanna Hai (I have a desire to live again), one of her most famous songs from the movie Guide, swept over the audience. As the crowd stood up and cheered, I got flashes of my childhood, when I watched the young Rahman on TV with my mother. I had the urge to call home just to say, “There she was. Waheeda Rahman!” My mother, who never learned to derive real pleasure from movies or books, who did not quite discover the world of arts, would often cheer up whenever this song came on TV. As a volunteer fiddled with a microphone, hovering over Rahman on stage, I could not help thinking, How must it feel? How must it feel to have almost fifty years of artistic work behind her, to be so loved and admired? I wondered whether one day I would be as old as her and be able to look back, if not to an era of black and white movies, to something else, something unknown that I have yet to discover.
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The real thrill came in the afternoon. I had been waiting all morning for this panel: “Coming Out: Tales They Don’t Tell”. A diverse group of writers from across the world sat on stage: Mark Gevisser, a South African known for his memoir about growing up gay in Johannesburg’s apartheid era; Sarah Waters, a Welsh woman who came out as a lesbian during the nineties in London and shot to fame after the publication of Tipping the Velvet, a story about same-sex love set in the Victorian era; Damon Galgut, also born in South Africa, with a new book titled Arctic Summer that explores how E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India was intrinsically tied to his unrequited love for a straight man; Christos Tsiolkas, who created a furore with his novel Loaded, about a young gay immigrant boy growing up in Australia; and Devdutt Pattanaik, who I always find captivating. Pattanaik has written over thirty books, investigating the hidden aspects of mythology and its relevance in modern times. The panel was moderated skilfully by Sandip Roy, back to Kolkata after spending some time in San Francisco, where he used to host a weekly radio show.
Pattanaik relayed an example from Bengali mythology when Krishna and Kali merge together. He also pointed out instances of Krishna being depicted wearing women’s clothes. The ideas here, he said, are fluidity, gender-merging, pleasure without boundaries, lack of set structures. Desire is eternal; resistance is temporary. In mythology, permanence is seen as a lack of wisdom. Sensuality is free-flowing. Gods indulge in pleasure, too. The problems, he maintained, are created by people who are uncomfortable with their sexuality, who interpret these mythologies by stripping them of sexuality. India suffers from a restrictive Gandhian gaze, a weak state and a very powerful society. And it’s a society that is obsessed with defining ourselves. In a country with so much diversity, the easiest way to define ourselves is through the family structure. Hence, any threat to a heteronormative family makes everyone nervous.
Galgut’s commentary on Forster was also eye-opening. “E.M. Forster was a convoluted and frightened gay man who could never come to terms with his sexuality,” he said. “A Passage to India took over ten years to complete. The book is ingrained in our psyche but people rarely know the hidden story behind it. I think Forster’s infatuation with a younger aristocrat was a mental block for him. For a long time, he couldn’t unleash the words that he needed to write the book.”
Speaking of words and language, Tsiolkas spoke poignantly about his childhood with Greek immigrant parents and how, when he realized he was gay, he did not have the language to come out to his parents. His parents did not understand English. There was no way for him to properly explain what being gay meant. He went on to talk about how, despite the widespread assumptions that associate him with the gay community, his work is all about belonging to a family. “I don’t want an identity that is outside the family structure,” he said.
Mark Gevisser is currently researching a project titled “The Global Sexuality Frontier”. It’s a new kind of conversation we are having, he said. Look at us, having this discussion in Jaipur. We could not be having this conversation twenty years ago. In the West, being gay is almost passé. Liberal parents are thrilled these days when their child comes out as a gay or a lesbian. It’s almost like their coming out is a validation of their politics, he quipped. But then let’s not forget, he said, this is not the case in many parts of the world.
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The evening ended with a panel titled “Double Lives: Writers as Critics”, where another diverse group of writers assembled to discuss what it takes to write a novel versus writing a critical piece about somebody else’s work. “It’s a distinction between authenticity versus authority,” Will Self claimed. “I think most great fiction writers can write criticism but it’s not necessarily true the other way around. Ultimately, criticism requires a different muscle. What is critical writing really? It’s all smoke and mirrors. We all pretend to have read more than we actually have. And it’s a slippery relationship we have with writers and their text. It’s overlaid with all kinds of irrational factors, just like life. Writers would be disingenuous if they claimed that they had any kind of objectivity.”
Amit Chaudhary posed interesting ideas about the dual roles of a novelist and a critic. The novel, in some ways, is shackled to the nineteenth century, to old ideas of what it actually is. Virginia Woolf, at one point, disavowed the novel. She found it too constraining. Chaudhary also confessed how he intentionally chose to broke away from writing novels. “I don’t like this expectation,” he said, “that a novelist is supposed to produce novels every two years, as if we are cows that get milked regularly. So I started writing essays. But then, there is also this nervousness that too much critical thinking blocks the creative process. I believe we can straddle both worlds. We can survive thinking; us creative writers – unlike Flaubert, who was so obsessive about every word he used. He only thought about commas.”
