In a city tense over ongoing protests by the Karni Sena on the release of the film Padmaavat , the five-day Jaipur Literature Festival at the fortified Diggi Palace was inaugurated in the presence of former Rajasthan governor Margaret Alva. In a keynote address, travel writer and novelist Pico Iyer emphasised the importance of literature in a world where nationalism is on the rise, to understand those different from us, and to show that what unites us is more important than what separates us.
“To believe in cultural appropriation can often, I think, be almost to give up on the possibility of someone different from oneself. It can be a dark form of nationalism. In this time of wars and travel bans, literature is more indispensable than ever, precisely because imagination is no respector of boundaries or fences,” he said. “Our words, and our ideas and our rigorous imaginings can take us a little bit past simplicities and remind us that ultimately we change the world by changing how we think of it.”
Many, Mr.Iyer continued, would love to return to a simpler world of us versus them. “In the past year or two, it’s as if the countryside is rising against the city, the desperate against those they see as privileged, and the past against the future. Literature is indispensable precisely because it is the voice of the individual. The individual knows she can’t be pushed into one single box or category, she knows emotions cant be reduced to simplicity.” The whole point of writing, Mr.Iyer said, is to dream your way into somebody other than yourself, and by doing so, to see how much of the other self is inside you, much like he did when he steeped himself into Islamic culture for four years for his novel.
Mr.Iyer started by pointing out how when he was in college studying English literature, all the books were English literature till the year 1832. “I don’t think many of us could have imagined that in just five years, English literature would be made by writers whose names most English people couldn’t spell: Coetzee, Ishiguro and Ghosh. They were not just throwing open the doors and the windows of their dusty Havisham house of literature, but they gave us new voices, new histories and new ways of telling their stories. Suddenly the world that we thought we knew was turned on its head.” Even today, he pointed out, the defining American writers are names that most American readers can’t pronounce, from Chimamanda Ngopzi Adichie to Jhumpa Lahiri, bringing their parents’ culture into their new adoptive culture, making new literature for a new kind of reader.
The festival today has Mr. Iyer speaking of his book The Art of Stillness , Philip Norman on The Beatles’ visit to India, investigative journalist Suki Kim on being undercover in North Korea, Zakir Hussain in conversation with Nasreen Munni Kabir about his life in music, Margarat Alva and Helena Kennedy in a session tilted ‘Women in Power’ and playwright and writer of Shakespeare in Love Tom Stoppard. Hindi writer will release the English translation of her book Padmini: The Spirited Queen of Chittor , and Nobel Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus will speak of his micro-finance initiative Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.
