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BOOKS
Home Together
Come winter and Delhi will see the first mega celebration
of imagining India
By S. Prasannarajan
No windowshopper
in the marketplace of metaphors can miss that showcased tropical seduction:
India Imagined in English. Let professional despairists from the English
countryside cry "fin de fiction", let senior citizens from "the
society of the novel", Europe, wail over ideas' desertion from their
art. In a manic profusion of creativity, India is multiplying on the page,
reaching out to distant languages in translations, and, of course, winning
prizes. No exaggeration, the alternative Republic of Imagination has the
potential to be a superpower. And it may even redeem the real one.
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| STAR TREK: Salman Rushdie |
Then, isn't it time for celebration? Time to
toast the redeemers? No second thoughts, it's overdue. And, at long last,
the official cultural establishment seems to have realised it. So wait
for an international winter festival of letters, evenings of homecoming
and hometalking, of memory renewed and history relived, of the multiple
tongues of India. Imagine: Salman Rushdie, perhaps the most "famous
writer" of the day, and certainly one of the few living writers who
can hold geographies and histories and cultures of a senseless world in
his palm with so much ease and exuberance, talking home and homelessness;
V. S. Naipaul, who, in the words of an admirer like Mario Vargas Llosa
is "the most British of British writers, not only because of the
elegance of his English, but above all because none of his colleagues
can equal him in those traditional English virtues (like) irony, sardonic
wit, gentle criticism", talking his experiments with "half-made
societies"; and you from the audience getting their just published
novels, The Fury and Half a Life, autographed ...
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| V.S. Naipaul |
Quite a possibility in the first week of December.
What the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) is organising from
December 1 to 6, in Delhi and nearby Neemrana in Rajasthan, is the country's
first international literary festival. Really, if you can have an international
film festival, why not a literary one? And who can deny that India's most
internationally saleable art form today is not films but fiction? As Himachal
Som, director general, ICCR, and the most enthusiastic parent of this
ambitious project, says, "literature today is the cutting edge of
our culture." To see the size of his ambition, look at his wish list:
apart from Naipaul and Rushdie, there are Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Arundhati
Roy, Rohinton Mistry, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Divakaruni Banerjee, Anita
Desai, Shashi Tharoor, Vikram Chandra, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Amit Chaudhuri,
Pico Iyer ... The diaspora dominates.
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| Amitav Ghosh |
And so it should. After all, the theme of the
festival, to be inaugurated by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee at
Vigyan Bhavan, Delhi, is "At Home in the World," courtesy Tagore's
Ghare Baire (The Home and the World). The displaced writer coming home,
en route the waystations of memory, is a familiar sight in modern fiction-in
the words of one of its great practitioners, "the eternity of return".
And home becomes starker in the page as the man who remembers moves farther
and farther away. The rite of memory makes farewells redundant. Can Rushdie,
for instance, despite his famous goodbye in The Ground Beneath Her Feet,
disengage himself from "my terra infirma, my maelstrom, my cornucopia,
my crowd ... fount of my imagination, source of my savagery, breaker of
my heart"? And, if that image in The Mimic Men-"I have visions
of Central Asian horsemen, among whom I am one, riding below a sky threatening
to snow to the very end of an empty world"-is a kind of self-portrait,
can Naipaul in his travels ever ignore India? This festival aspires to
be the definitive destination for writers for whom homecoming is a permanent
state of imagination.
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Jhumpa Lahiri
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The so-called emigrant writers, ones who have
found their voice after the liberating cry of Saleem Sinai in Midnight's
Children, may have written some of the most engrossing pages of Indian
Writing in English. The festival will certainly celebrate this fine moment
in literature, but it will also showcase some of the fine minds from Indian
languages. So, along with the best from India Imagined in English, you
will have some formidable names from Indian languages as well-Nirmal Verma,
U.R. Ananthamurthy, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Manoj Das,
Asok Mitran, Paul Zacharia and more. This way, the festival will turn
out to be a unifier in the polyphony of Indian imagination. Indian literature,
unlike European literature or Latin American literature or African literature
or American literature, is not language-specific; and it is one of the
festival's key discussion subjects-"Many languages, one literature".
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| GREAT EXPECTATIONS: Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
And if all goes well, there will be Gabriel Garcia
Marquez and Toni Morrison to make the festival truly international-and
formidably glamorous. Maybe one or two more from a shortlist that include
J.M. Coetzee, Gunter Grass, Alexander Solzhenitzyn, Alice Walker and John
Updike. The ICCR is also hoping to bring in the editors of The New Yorker,
The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington
Post Book World, The Times Literary Supplement and Granta. "I'm looking
forward to seeing Marquez, who I think is the greatest living writer,
and Toni Morrison, who is on her way to becoming one," says Penguin
India CEO and editor-in-chief David Davidar, whose conversation with Som,
two years ago at the launch of Vikram Seth's An Equal Music, was the origin
of the festival. "I told Himachal it was a shame we didn't have a
great literary festival of the kind held in Australia and England. He
got very enthusiastic and phoned me one day and said, 'let's do it'."
And Som's enthusiasm, already endorsed by the government, his boss that
is, has supporters in the British Council, the US and Canadian embassies
in India, the Ford Foundation, various publishers and the Sahitya Akademi.
Several hotels and airlines are willing to be sponsors. "Our main
aim will be to get Indian-American and American writers to India,"
says James Callahan, counsellor for public affairs at the US embassy.
For the British Council, "participating in the festival is a natural
progression". They have an entire team working on the project.
So, is the geography of literary festivals beginning
to expand? After Edinburgh, Dublin, Melbourne, Hay-on-Wye, prestigious
festival destinations where writers like Nadine Gordimer, Kazuo Ishiguro,
Jostein Gaarder, Naipaul, P.D. James, A.S. Byatt, Isabel Allende and Ian
McEvan can be found interacting with thousands of readers or discussing
the craft with fellow writers, is it going to be Delhi? Looks like. For,
in Delhi and at the Neemrana retreat, it will be celebration as well as
mindstorm. "It will be a great joy for writers and readers,"
says novelist Namita Gokhale, one of the coordinators. Hopefully, a joyous
moment for India of the imagination too: come home in the newest word.
--With Sonia Faleiro
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