At Festival in India, Books Are the Buzz
Published: January 24, 2010 By VIKAS BAJAJ
JAIPUR, India — A crowd, some members sitting on the floor, listened attentively last week as the author Amit Chaudhuri described the influence of writers from Ireland and the American South on his work.
Outside the tent where he was speaking, fans and photographers mobbed the Indian poet Gulzar, who shared the Oscar for the song “Jai Ho” in “Slumdog Millionaire,” blocking his exit from a hall. Elsewhere the Pakistani wunderkind Ali Sethi was fending off people who wanted to have pictures taken with him.
That was just the first day of the Jaipur Literature Festival, a five-day extravaganza that in only five years has become the official annual celebration of a vibrant and resurgent Indian and South Asian literary scene. By the time the festival ends on Monday, organizers estimate that some 30,000 people will have seen more than 200 authors and other speakers.
Indians might be known worldwide for being mad about cricket and Bollywood musicals, but they are also increasingly embracing literature in all its forms. Book sales have been rising as incomes and literacy have steadily climbed in recent years. Even the country’s once insular Hindi film industry, known for its formulaic song-and-dance dramas and thrillers, is taking notice of the boom and adapting popular novels into movies.
Vikram Chandra, the author of “Sacred Games,” said that when he was attending boarding school near Jaipur, few authors commanded the kind of celebrity that was on display at the festival, where schoolgirls — some from the elite Mayo College, at which he studied — chased him and other authors down for autographs.
Literature in India “was a cottage industry confined to the university,” he said. But in the past decade, and especially in the past five years, a booming economy has created big audiences for books, including genres like literary fiction, young women’s literature and children’s books, which were tiny niches earlier. Book sales here are increasing at about 5 percent a year, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“What we see now is intimately linked to the economic growth,” said Mr. Chandra, who teaches
creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley.
One indicator of the vibrancy of literature in India today was the presence of film stars from Mumbai and socialites from Delhi at the festival, Mr. Chandra said. “That itself is a sign of strength, when you can get the beautiful people in any culture to connect” with a medium, he added.
But for all the promise and potential of India’s literary scene, plenty of challenges and tensions remain.
Chiki Sarkar, the editor in chief of Random House India, said that while book sales were growing very quickly, most books still sell just a couple of thousand copies, a fraction of what even poorly performing books sell in the United States.
“Our worlds are growing, and our markets are growing, but they are just beginning to grow,” said Ms. Sarkar, who grew up in India but studied and worked in England before returning to work at Random House’s new Indian operation three years ago.
The same could be said of the Jaipur Literature Festival. Started five years ago as part of a broader cultural festival, it has taken on a life of its own in the past three years.
The festival is a product of two very different personalities: William Dalrymple, who has spent much of his professional career writing about South Asia; and Namita Gokhale, a writer of Hindi books who started an earlier literary festival to highlight lesser-known Indian writers working in Indian languages.
From the start, Mr. Dalrymple said, he wanted the festival to be a stage for Indian literary luminaries like Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth and Mr. Chandra, who, though born in India, live outside the country. But Ms. Gokhale was just as determined to make it a place to showcase lesser-known authors writing in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali and other regional Indian languages.
At one level their different aims dovetail, bringing together different threads of India’s diverse linguistic and artistic traditions. At the festival, for instance, Ms. Gokhale organized a handful of sessions with writers who are Dalit, members of the lowest rung of the caste system. Mr. Dalrymple, for his part, delivered notable and sought-after writers like Wole Soyinka, Alexander McCall Smith and Niall Ferguson.
That literary pedigree, combined with late-night music sessions by Indian and Western performers — and the fact that the festival is free — was a potent draw for visitors, who swelled into the front yard of the Diggi Palace, built in the 19th century.
But the two themes — the global India and the domestic India — do not always easily blend. Some authors in India said they had little interaction with foreign writers. The foreigners, for the most part, spent time with one another and with Indian writers from the West. Mr. Dalrymple and Ms. Gokhale acknowledge that their different interests often turn into heated arguments about the festival program.
Omprakash Valmiki, one of the Dalit writers, said that he felt that his and other books written in Hindi were starting to find bigger audiences at home and abroad. (His autobiography, “Joothan: A Dalit’s Life,” was published in English by Columbia University Press in 2003.)
Mr. Valmiki, who has a day job as an engineer at an Indian government defense factory, said he almost turned down the invitation to attend the festival because he thought it would be too exclusive. But he said he was glad he had come after all, because the sessions he participated in were packed. Though he had few conversations with writers working in English, he said he was pleasantly surprised when a former chief minister of Rajasthan state stopped him and told him she had bought his book and was looking forward to reading it.
“Things change slowly,” he said in Hindi. “Literature can’t create a revolution overnight. It creates a base that changes society over time.”
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