Close to 300 people, including artists, writers, actors, journalists, historians and a politician will participate in the 12th edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) to be held over five days from January 24 to 28, 2019, at Diggi Palace Hotel.
The programme for JLF 2019 was unveiled at a cultural event held at the Royal Opera House on Wednesday evening by festival director William Dalrymple and producer Sanjoy Roy. Among this edition’s highlights is a focus on artificial intelligence and the presence of Life of Pi author Yann Martell. “The only other author to hold out longer than [Martell] is Margaret Atwood, who made us wait for eight years before she agreed to come,” Mr. Dalrymple said.
The tone for the event was set by a performance by the Mooralala Marwada Ensemble, eventually leading to a discussion centred around the #MeToo movement. Dubbed ‘#MeToo and the Culture of Impunity: Conversations Across Generations’, the discussion between screenwriter and director Vinta Nanda, writer Shobha De, filmmaker Shazia Iqbal, LGBTQ activist Saniya Sheikh and CEO of Lodestar UM Nandini Dias was moderated by journalist Namita Bhandare.
The hour-long discussion centred around the experiences of women who have come out with their experiences of sexual abuse, and the response of the media and public at large to the #MeToo movement.
Ms. Nanda declared that this would be her last panel discussion on the matter and said, “I want to go back to my normal life now.” She spoke frankly about the victimisation of survivors. “When it comes to collateral damage, nobody looks back at what the survivor has gone through. Look at the collateral damage I or many like me had to face,” Ms. Nanda said.
Ms. Sheikh said, “At the crux of [the] movement is a conversation about consent, which stems very much from how we look at relationships and interactions. How are we talking to other people? It has to do with how the norms and caste structures and class structures are hand in hand.”
At the end, Ms. Bhandare asked two questions of the audience: how many members of the audience had faced sexual harassment at their workplace.
The response from a full house of 575 at the Royal Opera House indicated at least one-third of the audience had been affected. Ms. Bhandare’s next query was how many had reported such instances, to which only a handful of hands remained in the air, indicating that a movement like #MeToo still needs to widen its impact in society.
