Festival of ideas

Festival of ideas
By Shashi Tharoor
"The Hindu", Online edition of India's National Newspaper
September 10, 2006

For all the reflected glory and the chatter that goes on, the best literary festivals offer the humbling realisation that books are more important than writers.

If the home of Hollywood and Burbank, the capital of the mass entertainment industry, could celebrate something as solitary and unglamorous as reading, why not Chennai?

PHOTO: AP

Celebrating books and writing... (From left): Vikram Seth, V.S. Naipaul and Amitav Ghosh at Neemrana.

ONE of the fringe benefits of being an author is getting to meet other authors. After the international publication of my books, I discovered that writers are as much a global community as doctors or racing-car drivers. They meet at conferences and seminars, read each other's books (or, more commonly, discuss each other's books without having read them), share startlingly intimate gossip about each other, and join each other in promoting earnest causes from human rights to the environment. Sometimes they are brought together for the ostensibly literary purpose of celebrating themselves.
Not newsworthy
Of course, literary festivals are rarely newsworthy events — not real news, anyway. They are not unfairly seen as occasions for authors to get together, wallow in self-congratulation and persuade themselves that they are performing a public service in the bargain. Writers come, confer and consume, and literature serves only to provide a unifying purpose under the cover of which a good time is had by all. The emphasis is usually on conviviality, not controversy.
The idea of the international literary festival has been slow to come to India, but it is widely popular around the world. The Hay-on-Wye Festival in Wales, held in a village with the largest collection of second-hand bookshops on the planet, has acquired legendary status. I have been privileged to be invited to appear at festivals in exotic locations ranging from Toronto's Harbourfront to the medieval city of St. Malo in Brittany (France) and the artists' village of Ubud in Bali (Indonesia), though I haven't actually made it to the last-mentioned. Amongst the more amazing locales I have found myself at was the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, billed as America's largest literary gathering, an annual event that overwhelms the University of California's UCLA campus on the last weekend in April. If the home of Hollywood and Burbank, the capital of the mass entertainment industry, better known for its trivial game shows and glittering but insubstantial soirées, could celebrate something as solitary and unglamorous as reading, why not Chennai?
Perhaps partially because the idea of a literary festival has never quite caught on in our country, even though the reading habit — and the respect for literature — is deeply entrenched amongst our people. Ironically, just two years ago, an Akhil Bharatiya Sahitya Sammelan was organised by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan — not in New Delhi but in New York. So New Yorkers were treated to an experience you would be hard-pressed to find in any of our major metropolises in India: Gulzar declaiming his Urdu poetry, Sunil Gangopadhyay speaking about the Bengali novel, and M.T. Vasudevan Nair explaining the history of Malayalam fiction, as well as poetry mushairas, lectures and panel discussions. Even while I was mouthing a silent shabash, the question kept occurring to me — why not something like this in India?
Small beginnings
A beginning was made earlier this year by a festival called "Kitab". It focussed on Indian and British writers who work in English, so the great Indian names I've cited did not appear. But it would be wonderful if others whose work is mainly in Indian languages could be offered an opportunity to convene somewhere in India — just as the Bhavan arranged for them to do so in New York — so that the great indigenous literary traditions of India can showcase and celebrate their own work.
So I'm happy to appear at the literary festival in Berlin next weekend, in the company of authors, publishers, editors and (perhaps above all) readers. For a writer, to be a member of this community is a unique privilege, and yet one whose pleasures are primarily self-referential. You are introduced to other writers as a member of their tribe; you meet them, in this sense, as an equal. People who have been names on the spines of books, faces you have only seen on dust-jackets, suddenly become intimate and accessible. Some even claim to have heard of you, or to admire your work. It is all heady stuff, much of it for the wrong reason, a sense of ennoblement by association ("I belong amongst this company, so I must matter, as they do").
Humble realisation
But, for all the reflected glory, all the chatter (and there is a lot of chatter, much of it excruciatingly well-informed, about the failings of this or that literary agent, the quality of the food at a particular publisher's parties, the sex life of an author in hiding), the best literary festivals offer the humbling realisation that the books are more important than the writers, that indeed the writers are only important because of their books (and the ideas and insights they contain). And with that realisation comes the knowledge that you only belong in their company because of something greater than yourself, some part of the infinite mystery of creation to which you have been able to lend your words.