The winds of literature whisper change across this nation. As spring blooms over the Kashmir valley, Srinagar may soon see its first peaceful festival of literature in three years this February. In the northeast, Guwahati has just wrapped up its maiden literary festival. Today, on the final day of The Hindu Lit for Life in Chennai, the curtains also fall on India’s first Crime Writer’s Festival (CWF) in New Delhi. Meanwhile in Kolkata, the sixth edition of the Apeejay Literary Festival winds down to a close at the National Library of India. In a few days the doors of Jaipur’s Diggi Palace will swing open to welcome the oldest and largest “free literary festival” in India.
Just a decade ago, if you went literary-festival hopping across the nation, your pit stops would have been few and far between. Today, our calendars are dotted with over 60 literary festivals across the country’s metros and two-tier cities, some rich and thriving, and others weak on fledgling feet. The curators, directors and producers of these festivals say that the line between the two is a fine one.
As the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) strides into another edition, with a star-studded line-up of Indian and international authors, festival co-director Namita Gokhale says that, each year, her curatorial instincts have had one focus: to build bridges between India’s vast treasures of disparate languages and literatures. “It’s also about breaking the barriers between a largely cosmopolitan audience that comes with its own set of prejudices, and authors and readers of Indian languages who sometimes feel victimised. There’s a certain parochialism on both sides that dissolves when you expose people to juxtapositions that aren’t lazy,” she says.
Vikram Sampath, co-founder of the Bangalore Literature Festival (BLF), echoes exactly the same sentiment. With the third edition behind it (in September last year), BLF upheld its tradition of centring the festival around a different lesser-known literary niche each season. While it was Australian literature in the first year, and German in the second, authors from Northeast India were in focus last year. “Rather than setting up a panel of just bhasha writers, which is a sort of stepmotherly treatment, I’ve found that integration between genres comes beautifully when you put people from multiple languages together,” says Sampath.
A festival’s success depends as much on intuitive programming as on tuning into the psyche of the host city and reflecting that nature. As Maina Bhagat, co-director of the Kolkata Literary Festival, says, “A festival without character is no festival at all!” KLF gets its spirit of merging the city’s rich literary inheritance with a lively present by conducting a festival about contemporary literary concerns at heritage sites across Kolkata. From the opening ceremony at the 200-year-old Indian Museum to sessions at the Victoria Memorial and, of course, the 94-year-old Oxford Bookstore (where the festival originated) and even a literary heritage walk through Kolkata this year, “the festival is as much about the city as it is about literature,” says Bhagat.
Inevitably, it’s the ethos of the festival that draws its unique mix of audiences. At BLF, with its breezy, open-air venues, game sites, exhibitions, and parallel children’s literature festival all centred in Electronic City, the audience is either young families that spend their entire weekend popping in and out of events, or techies testing their feet in literary waters. “It’s this fun, friendly ambience that breaks people’s inhibitions about fitting into a literary festival, and encourages youngsters to step out of their cubicles and discover new literatures,” says Sampath. True to Bangalore’s tech strengths, BLF was also one of the first festivals to broadcast its events live on radio and now live video stream besides keeping the virtual buzz humming with live blogs and social media updates.
In that sense, literary festivals are no longer merely literary. The BLF, for instance, has always closed each day with a cultural performance rooted in South Indian heritage, be it Bombay Jayashri’s Carnatic concert, or the Mysore Brothers’ performance last edition. JLF’s music line-up is as enticing as its illustrious author list. “Let’s not kid ourselves! There’s only so much of the word you can take. It’s at these evenings of unwinding that writers meet their readers, publishers meet writers, deals are struck, and a community that loves literature is nurtured,” says Mita Kapur, producer of the Mountain Echoes Literary Festival in Bhutan, the Patna Literary Festival that specialises in Hindi, Urdu and Maithili literature, and the CWF.
While the two-day CWF is probably the nation’s only genre-specific festival — even taking an in-depth look at the sub-genres of true crime, political crime, thrillers, gender violence and terrorism in crime fiction — the festival also found a way to link to the arts, just like its more mainstream counterparts. The festival closes with a musical and dramatic rendering of a piece from Sherlock Holmes. As Bhagat likes to put it, “The world of books is really one that encompasses every other world because every subject is, after all, written about. And literary festivals must reflect that inclusivity.”
In the years that literary festivals have grown, they’ve also evolved a distinctly Indian model. Unlike international festivals such as Hay Festival of Literature and Arts in Wales or the Edinburgh International Book Festival that are ticketed, India largely encourages a free-for-all system that has left organisers entirely dependent on sponsorship. “It’s been vital that we keep things this way, at least at the start, to encourage a reading culture in the country. But, a time will come when some events will have to be ticketed. We eventually need to move to a more self-sustaining revenue model,” says Kapur. While BLF, thus far, is among the rare literary festivals that have floated on crowd-funding, Sampath says they too are considering corporate sponsorship for expansion.
What the world, however, has imbibed from the Indian model of the literary festival is its sense of balance between English literature and the bhasha languages, notes Gokhale, who is also co-director of the Mountain Echoes Literary Festival. She cites Krakow’s Conrad Festival that took its inspiration from JLF’s non-Anglophone nature to include German, French, Spanish, Polish and Russian writers in its line-up. “It is this Indian mix of taking the best of home-grown literature and bringing the bounties of national and international literatures to the table that’ll keep our festivals alive,” says Bhagat.
While literary festival loyalists have often complained that, in this pandering to all tastes, both popular and literary alike, festivals have sometimes diluted their core, curators such as Kapur counter that the crowds may come for the celebrity faces but invariably stay on to discover someone they’d never read before. “It’s that joy of discovery that festivals should be about,” she says. As Gokhale observes, “At each festival, I’m amazed at how well-read audiences can be. We’ve made a practise of assuming that audiences will lap up things that are trivialised for them; but people who love books are a peculiar kind, you see. They want to examine and understand their world. As long as you don’t throw information at them, but give them intelligent, challenging reading — the kind that audiences are evidently hungry for — the literary festival will thrive.”
