To the delight of literature buffs who love nothing better than a grand literary spat, this year’s Jaipur Literature Festival has opened with a flaming row at the heart of which lies the person of William Dalrymple, one of the Festival’s two co-Directors, who was described in a caustic piece appearing in Open Magazine as the "pompous arbiter of literary merit in India".
The controversy has given the Festival additional and rather unsought for publicity with newspapers like the Telegraph , The Guardian and even the staid Wall Street Journal giving the quarrel wide coverage.
The row itself revolves around a personalized attack against Mr Dalrymple by Hartosh Bal and the Indian-domiciled Scotsman's equally vituperative response against what he alleged was "racism", but one which still manages to raise a few fundamental questions about what the Morrocan writer Tahar Ben Jalloun once described as "persistent colonial complexes on both sides, and by that I mean, the role of a neo-coloniser and that of the neo-colonised" in a completely new politico-economic landscape.
Tahar, who has won the prestigious Prix Goncourt, the French equivalent of the Booker, was of course speaking of the French situation where a writer from a former French or Belgian colony using the coloniser’s tongue, whether in Lebanon, Algeria, Tunisia, Morrocco or sub-Saharan Africa, feels he or she does not exist as an author unless recognition and acceptance comes from the French literary establishment.
Why is it, Bal's piece in Open magazine asks, that Indians who have managed to shed their colonial complexes in fields such as IT, acdemics, business or medicine, continue to harbour feelings of inadequacy when it comes to writing in English, looking up to the British literary establishment for validation and recognition ?
There is no doubt that the flamboyant and exuberant Dalrymple, whose books on India and Indian history have been acclaimed at home and abroad, has managed to rub several members of the Indian literary establishment the wrong way. His performance at last year’s festival (reading his own texts while Paban Das Baul sang and swayed) had already raised a few hackles. “Agreed that he is a fine writer and has won several awards. But as the Director of the Festival he should not be hogging so much of the limelight. A bit of discretion would certainly help,” a critic had confided last year.
An angry Indian editor from a well known and respected publishing house acidly described Dalrymple as “that self-promoting 'White Mughal' who has turned down all my authors”. White Mughal is the title of one of his recent bestsellers. The publisher wished to remain unnamed “because Jaipur remains the most important literary event in the country and one day I would like my writers to be invited there and it just does not do to get on Willie’s wrong side”.
But there is no gainsaying the fact that without William Dalrymple and his co-Director, the much more “discreet” Namita Gokhale, there would be no Jaipur Literature Festival at all.
In his introductory remarks a couple of years ago Dalrymple had said he wanted this festival because he realized after visiting literary events around the world that Indian writers writing in English have no venue or festival to call their own. But has that original idea, to showcase writing in India both in the Bhashas as well as in English, been overtaken by the ambition to make Jaipur the greatest literary show on earth and therefore take the international literary celebrity path while lesser Indian voices go unheard?
Perhaps the Jaipur Literature Festival has become the victim of its own success. With seven Booker winners and two Nobels, the festival has more than 200 writers in attendance who will be discussing their work, the problems and issues that preoccupy humankind in a rapidly changing world.
“I think this entire controversy is silly and should not have taken place. As far as I am concerned, William and I have two completely different approaches and styles and it is these contradictions that also add to or even make up the success of the Festival,” Namita Gokhale told The Hindu.
There will be panel discussions, lectures, workshops and musical concerts. J.M. Coetzee, Kiran Desai, Orhan Pamuk are some of the major draws. “But the Bhashas have not been ignored. There will be discussions on Tamil pulp fiction, on the Hindi blogosphere and a wonderful blend of the English and the Bhashas, with Hindi and other language writers occasionally sharing the same panels with those who write in English. And then there are writers from South Asia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Pakistan. All this says something about where we want to go and what we want to do. ” Gokhale said.
V.K.Karthika, the chief editor and publisher at Harper Collins said: “What Jaipur should be doing is giving more space to new Indian voices and I hope that will happen in future.”
Urvashi Butalia of Zubaan said “I am extremely pleased to see so many women writers. I am also pleased that the language events have not been pushed off to the last days because as you know the impact making days are the first two inaugural ones and this time there is a good mix of the two.”
Bal may have hit home however, because, as he notes in one of his rejoinders, Dalrymple, in a hurried makeover of his CV on the Festival’s website, now includes his Indian awards whereas earlier the only ones mentioned were the ones conferred by British juries.
