'This British notion of history forced us, Kambar said, to see our own literature through a distorted perspective.'

QUIZ question for the literary-minded: where in the world did many of the giants of Indian literature gather at the end of September for an Akhil Bharatiya Sahitya Sammelan inaugurated by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee? First prize for the smart kid in the back row who said "New York". Yes, it was in the unlikely setting of New York, in a building uncompromisingly called the Manhattan Center, that you could hear, over three days, Gulzar declaim his Urdu poetry, Sunil Gangopadhyay speak about the Bengali novel, and M.T. Vasudevan Nair explain the history of Malayalam fiction, under the presiding authority of the head of the Sahitya Akademi, Dr. Gopichand Narang. This extraordinary event, which drew crowds ranging from a hundred to 500 expatriates on each of the three days, was an initiative of the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. And it proved a triumph for one man who, in this city, is synonymous with the institution — the indefatigable septuagenarian Dr. P. Jayaraman, a Madrasi who writes books in shuddh Hindi and who, in New York, IS the Bhavan.

So New Yorkers were treated to an experience you would be hard-pressed to find in any of our major metropolises in India: a "kavi sammelan" featuring the likes of Gulzar, the Marathi poet Dilip Chitre, the Kannada poets Chandrasekhar Kambar and Vaidehi, the Oriya poet Harprasad Das, the Urdu poets Bashir Badr and Shahryar; a panel discussion chaired by Nirmal Verma in which the Hindi novelist Kamleshwar rubbed shoulders with the Punjabi poet Sutinder Singh Noor, and another bringing together the Jnanpith-winning Assamese writer Indira Goswami with the Sahitya Akademi Award-winning Sindhi writer Moti Prakash; and "breakout sessions" conducted by eminent writers in their own languages (13 Indian languages were represented). The range and quality of the talent on offer was matched by the breathtaking level of accomplishment on display; it would be like having Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, John Updike, Philip Roth, Edward Albee, and Don de Lillo all addressing a seminar on American literature in New Delhi.

Indian writing in English was somewhat more modestly represented. I was privileged to be billed as the "main speaker" for a panel discussion on "unity, difference and history" in Indian literature, with the Akademi's Dr. Narang in the Chair, and legends like "M.T." and Kambar on the podium alongside — an honour underscored by the presence in the audience of 20 of India's greatest writers and one former Prime Minister (the polylingual and highly literate P.V. Narasimha Rao). I offered my thoughts on the authenticity of English as a valid language to express the Indian sensibility, arguing that language is, ultimately, a vehicle, not a destination. To be greeted afterwards by two maestros of Hindi writing, Kamleshwar and Manohar Shyam Joshi, with a request for my text so that they could write me a rejoinder, capped my day.

The obligations of my U.N. life during the first weekend of the annual General Assembly (the event that had brought Prime Minister Vajpayee to New York) prevented me from attending as many of the events as I would have wished, but it was clear that the tireless Dr. Jayaraman had a hit on his hands. The poetry mushairas were inevitably the biggest successes, but the quality of the seminar discussions was high. To listen to M.T. Vasudevan Nair describing the Keralite's deep-rooted love of books — "copying texts neatly and artistically was a very common and dignified pastime for middle-class housewives until the first quarter of the last century" — was both instructive and delightful. To hear Harprasad Das, a senior civil servant as well as poet, talk about how the Mahabharata served as a common source of inspiration for both himself and me, was stimulating (I was glad he did not draw other parallels between the bureaucratic responsibilities from which both of us have sought to escape in our writing!)

One intervention that I found particularly striking was that of the Kannada poet, playwright and film-maker Kambar, who argued that the Indian cultural sensibility was marked by its non-linear notion of time: "time is not a controlled sequence of events in our minds, but an amalgamation of all events, past to present". Against the Western notion of "history", Kambar posited a view of "many ages and many worlds", including the mythic, constituting the Indian sense of present reality. Krishna's lesson to Arjuna on the Kurukshetra battlefield, Kambar argued, is not remote for us; that is why the frenzied mobs in Ayodhya cannot be persuaded by those (like me) who want them to leave the past alone. (The intellectual who says to the Bajrang Dal thug, "leave the past where it is", is confronted by the Hindu sage who replies, "the past is here".) Kambar went on to challenge the notion that the "lack of historical consciousness is a shortcoming", and declared that it was only an intellectual surrender to the British that led Indians to "consider living outside history an insult".

We imitated the West in creating museums to house the relics of our past, whereas traditionally we had lived with our past in our daily present. This British notion of history forced us, Kambar said, to see our own literature through a distorted perspective. We are obsessed with the "original" nature of historic texts and with the need to separate them from later interpolations. Instead of swallowing the Western notion of the integrity of a text and its sole author, we ought to celebrate the way in which Indians continually told and retold the Mahabharata, adding to it and modifying it. It is a matter of pride, Kambar declared, "that an entire country has collectively created the epic over a period of 10,000 years".

This was the point I had myself sought to make in reinventing the Mahabharata myself in my satirical The Great Indian Novel.

At least from 400 B.C. to 400 A.D., we know the epic was constantly being retold in countless versions around the country. Why did we stop retelling it?

Buoyed by the success of the Sahitya Sammelan, a beaming Dr. Jayaraman tells me he has plans for a new literary event next year. This time, he says, he wants to focus on Indian writing in English. Wonder what New York's NRIs will make of that.