It is when words fail that weapons are used, one could argue, and literature is about the pre-eminence of the first. The third edition of the American chapter of the Jaipur Literary Festival (JLF) last week, was an attempt to showcase the potential range of common topics of discussion among societies, the organizers said. Featuring nearly 80 authors from all over the world, discussed words and weapons, faded revolutions and lingering anxieties from climate collapse to nuclear apocalypse.
The JLF in America is a platform for “dialogue and the opportunity to listen” in a climate overwhelmed by extreme voices, Sanjoy Roy, producer of the festival, said. The choice of Boulder as the host city was part accidental, explained Namita Gokhale, festival director, but it helps that the midwestern city on the foothills of the Rocky Mountains has been voted the brainiest city in the U.S. with more Ph.D.’s per capita than any other city. Nearly 10,000 people attended this year’s JLF@Boulder.
Member of Parliament and author Shashi Tharoor said unless the existing nuclear powers are willing to take some steps towards disarming themselves, nuclear proliferation around the world could continue.
“Unless you start a new conversation on the issue, we are in for unhappy times. More and more countries may think going nuclear is essential. Iran may do it, Saudi Arabia may do it,” the diplomat-turned-politician said, speaking at a discussion on former U.S Senator Larry Pressler’s book Neighbors in Arms .
Diplomacy and writing can go well together, as words are the weapon in diplomacy, agreed two senior Indian diplomats — Ambassador to the U.S. Navtej Sarna and High Commissioner to Canada Vikas Swarup, both writers of eminence and speakers at the festival.
“As a diplomat, writers are trained to deal with words. That’s our primary calling. One wrong nuance can send a relationship with another country into a tailspin…..You are constantly reading, analysing and interpreting your country for a foreign audience. I love having this dual existence — being a writer and a diplomat,” said Mr. Swarup.
Mr. Sarna, who has written multiple books around the life and culture of Punjab and the Sikh community, pointed out that literature has not adequately reflected on the Partition of the subcontinent, which was accompanied by massive violence on both sides of the border. The Ambassador, whose works include translations of his father Mohinder Singh Sarna’s stories against the backdrop of the Partition, said: “The trauma of Partition has not fully played out in our literature. The previous generations were too close to the events…-probably, now people could see it all with a cool eye and reflect on that period.”
His father's work was a celebration of humanity, in the midst of brutality, Mr Sarna said. “Each one of his stories is about that…..regardless of religion, people come to help one another..- that is where the hope of recovery lies,” he said.
A conversation between Michael Rezendes, the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer-winning investigative reporter and The Hindu ’s Editor Mukund Padmanabhan focused on sexual abuse by Catholic priests and the craft of investigative reporting. The Oscar-winning film Spotlight was based on the investigative series by Mr. Rezendes and his colleagues. Child sexual abuse occurs in many situations in which there is a combination of power imbalance and absence of public accountability but the problem is acute in the Catholic church because of the institutional cover up, he said. Mr. Rezendez said because of the celibacy requirement of the church, many priests enter into liaisons.
“Many are having sex with women and a smaller cohort with children. But they are all bound to protect one another. It becomes more about the institution than the people that the institution is supposed to protect,” he said, adding, “Vatican should provide some guideline and protocol on how the church deals with all this.”
Investigative reporting of the kind that his team has been doing, spread over months and based on documentation, are not easy for competitors to duplicate, unlike ‘exclusives’ that are based on special access to power centres, he pointed out.
Nationalism, feminism, colonialism, globalism and revolutions - themes were all usual, but against the backdrop of political and social upheavals around the world of which India and America are no exceptions, JLF in America had a unique meaning this year perhaps.
Devesh Kapoor, Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania argued that religious nationalism in America and India could be the result of people unsettled by technology looking for mooring.
Mr. Padmanabhan pointed out that the globalism versus nationalism binary that dominates political debates around the world may not be applicable in India’s case, where the nationalists are not necessarily anti-globalists.
