Literary Days at the Norwich Showcase

Some days of one's life one feels grateful for nothing more than the simple pleasure of being alive, and among people tuned not just to the same frequency (principally the wavelength answering to a love of language, jokes, and coffee), but also the same forms -- the old and new ones of literature, literary debate, production, and transmission.

I've been thinking these unoriginal, but nevertheless compelling, thoughts particularly strongly over the last four days as I attend, from morning to night, a set of readings and discussions in England at the Norwich Showcase, an event organised by the British Council. The festival brings together 40 of the best contemporary British writers working in a diversity of forms and languages (across fiction, poetry, drama, performance poetry, nature writing, translation) with a set of representatives from literary organizations, periodicals and festivals from Britain and around the world from Brazil to Uganda to Malaysia to Canada. I'm in Norwich to speak about contemporary Indian literature, and my own work as the Fiction & Poetry editor of The Caravan.

Very often the pleasures of a text are enhanced by the voice of the mind that composed them. Over the last four days I've heard verse by Hannah Lowe, several of them about her father, a professional gambler (a recording of which you can hear here; the texts of some of the poems are here), Tom Warner (here's his very funny and acute poem "Day Thirty-Two", about a survivor of an air crash on a desert island looking at life around him, and here are two others called "Magician" and "Under Natural History"), Kei Miller (who read his excellent "12 Notes For a Light Song of Light"), and Lavinia Greenlaw. If you'd like to listen to Miller and Warner reading one after the other, a podcast of their readings alongside the poet Emily Berry is here.

Yesterday I also enjoyed the writers Robert Macfarlane, whose work I admire greatly, and Adam Foulds talking about new directions in writing about landscape. Macfarlane spoke illuminatingly about the centrality in literature of "the connection of aesthetics to ethics -- the idea that if you learn to see the world differently you'll probably behave differently" and turned the idea into an image by describing it as "a fairly reliable two-stroke engine".

Later, the novelist Adam Thirlwell delivered a razor-sharp talk about the idea of translation not as a substitute for the original but rather a match for it, involving a number of subjective choices made by the individual translator that can never be worked up into a replicable theory or system. Here's is Thirlwell's essay "The Joyful Side of Translation". There was also an astonishing session of performance poetry last night by Luke Wright, who compressed dozens of verbal riffs, jabs, jests and grumbles into a quarter of an hour of pure energy -- a bit like a verbal equivalent of a surging and dipping run downfield by Gareth Bale, the left-winger of the most romantic football team on the planet, Tottenham Hotspur. (Wright cracked everyone up with his line "Some of my best women are friends".)

But there's also been a chance to learn about a host of strategies being employed in our shapeshifting literary world to bring new readers to literature, use new media in the service of literature, and link up the private and the social sides of literature. The marvellously funny and articulate writer Damian Barr is also the salonniere for the Shoreditch House Literary Salon, which hosts an evening, free to all, of readings and bookchat among writers selected by Barr in London every few weeks (the Facebook page for the Salon is here; I'm going to the next event, "Faith and Doubt", on Wednesday the 14th). This isn't your standard meet-the-celebrity event: no books are available for sale, and there are no signings either -- it's all about the written word and the conversation during and after.

The Ugandan writer Doreen Baingana spoke of her work setting up support networks for women writers with her group Femrite, and the writer Jorge Antonio Marques of Brazil (who has, among other things, written a book about the history of tattoos) described his efforts to set up a most unusual literary festival, Flupp, to be held in Rio de Janeiro later this year, to be held on a hilltop in a favela. Samantha Schnee spoke about the work she and her colleagues have done over the last decade publishing over a thousand writers from over a hundred countries in English translation in the marvellous webzine Words Without Borders. Recent issues include a special on the Arab Spring, and an older one focussed on Urdu fiction from India. (An old Middlestage review  from 2007 of a Words Without Borders anthology is here.)

And with that I'm off to shop, during our lunch break, at a little secondhand bookstore opposite the Norwich Cathedral, where all of today's events are being held against the background of the cathedral's steepling spire. My little jaunt there during the morning's coffee break has already yielded two quite rare books, which further intensifies my conviction that there's no university in the world quite as useful as a good secondhand bookshop.

A response to Hartosh Singh Bal (again), and a note on Open magazine

Here are some thoughts, some of them reposted from the magazine website, on the recent Open magazine controversy about the current state of Indian literature (1, 2, 3), and especially Hartosh Singh Bal's last piece, "Does Dalrymple Know What Racism Really Is?"

Unfortunately, Open magazine strikes me as being greatly fascinated by the subject of Indian literature without really being interested in the actual books that comprise it – interested, that is, in literary opinion without the actual work of considered and independent-minded literary judgment.

Indeed, Open's own recent books coverage seems to me an excellent example of the very Anglo-servility that the magazine decries so passionately – and, on this evidence, hypocritically – in another section of its pages.

Consider this: two out of three books pieces in the current issue of January 22 are, respectively, an immensely long interview with the obscure Rowan Somerville, winner of this year's Bad Sex In Fiction Award (which is handed out by a British literary magazine) and then, even more perplexingly, a review of Somerville's book itself. It's as if no worthy books appeared in India this week, and as if the Bad Sex In Fiction prize is actually a major honour that requires readers to scramble towards the neglected book in question in the same way as a Crossword Literary Prize or a Booker.

If this isn't the most slavish genuflection at the feet of literary England (and that too over a minor episode within England's own literary culture) then what is? And aren't Indian writers who've put years of hard work into books that might have been released this week entitled to be dismayed by the magazine's misplaced priorities?

What is most disturbing for Indian writers about this is that Open's editor, Manu Joseph, is himself an Indian novelist of some repute, and winner of last year's The Hindu Best Fiction Award for his novel Serious Men. Serious Men, when it came out last year, was widely reviewed in the Indian press, perhaps partly because – if one wants to make an Open-like case for too much foreign influence – the book had already been sold in other major literary markets and gained plenty of pre-release notice, but also, to my mind, because it was indeed a genuinely good book (as I myself argue here).

But it seems clear, looking at the pages of Open, that the close consideration of literary merit from which Joseph himself benefited, and without which he might have not won the prize, is not a courtesy that he is usually willing to extend on the pages of his magazine to other Indian novelists – particularly those who appear in translation and need all the attention they can get (even if positive things are finally not said about their work) if we are to become a genuinely equitable literary culture.

It seems to me nothing short of scandalous that the magazine should allot precious review space to books like Somerville's, for no other reason than that the word "sex" and a constellation of related activities is activated by this focus, while blithely ignoring recent releases by major Indian writers, such as the great Kannada novelist UR Ananthamurthy's novel Bharathipura, which has just appeared in English translation.

If Mr.Bal and Mr.Joseph are really as exercised by the idea of a continuing Indian "literary Raj" as they claim to be, and are looking for further evidence to help prosecute their case, they need look no further than the books section of this week's edition of their own magazine. The questions they might pose to themselves then are, for the first time in this long-drawn and unsavoury episode, sure to yield some genuinely valuable answers.

Last, some of the atrocious tabloid-style reports that then appeared in the major Indian newspapers during the Jaipur Literature Festival only confirmed that this sort of bad faith and empty posturing is a widespread malaise in Indian letters.

Consider, for example, the absurdly snide and disrespectful tone of this fairly typical piece, for which it would be pointless to blame only the writer whose byline appears on it. If this kind of writing was merely the result of ignorance and linguistic disability, then it might still be condoned.

But the truth is such work actually represents a carefully worked out and calculated cynicism, which sees literature less as an autonomous entity with books at its centre, and more as a subset of the celebrity-and-entertainment-gossip industry, to be sexed up whenever possible and reduced to personalities rather than works. Let's face it – it's the newspapers (with a few honorable exceptions) that want writing like this, perhaps because it attracts eyeballs, even if for all the wrong reasons, and helps bring in advertising revenues. These are the kinds of ugly, trivialising, homegrown power structures, numbing our minds day after day, by which Indian literature is, far more than any foreign literary raj, tragically held hostage.

My original response to Bal's essay in the magazine is here:

Hartosh Singh Bal's latest salvo -- and his first in Indian letters as a chest-thumping, hard-drinking Sardar, a persona that was only implicit in his earlier detonations -- seems to me to make no other point than that he is spoiling for a fight. Reading his "rebuttal", I could hear the nagada drum booming violently in every paragraph.

What seems most suspicious about Bal's piece is that, although he insists that his argument is more about a larger issue than about personalities, he loses no opportunity to drag the debate down to just that: a wrestle in the akhada or a guzzle-contest in the bar. In his conclusion, he might have re-emphasised that, in making the arguments he does, he had the good of Indian literature at heart. Instead, we got a gust of hot air about Sikhs and Scots (which ended up, as one commenter pointed out, actually meaning the very opposite of what it intended).

There seems little point in trying to refute any of Bal's allegations and insinuations, as it seems clear from these pieces that he's not one to admit that he's anything other than one hundred per cent right. It was only if his piece had been properly reasoned to begin with that one could have had a reasoned debate with him.

I'd just like to make a few remarks about the point at which Bal says, of Dalrymple and Jaipur: "Much has also been made by him and others of the diversity or range of the Jaipur festival. That in no way takes away from the point I am making. In the same way that the need for equal-opportunity employment betrays an unequal society, the need to stress this aspect only emphasises that the people who remain the focus of attention at the festival are not homegrown."

Having been to the Jaipur Literaure Festival four of the five years it has been in existence (including the first year, when it had tiny audiences of 40 or 50 people at most events), I'd like to say that Bal's comparison of the festival programme to "equal-opportunity employment" is not just unfair but deliberately (and indeed predictably) disingenuous, particularly since he has never been to the event himself and relies, for his allegations, completely on hearsay.

Over the years I've gone with my notebook and pen to many of what, after Bal, one would have to call the "homegrown" events at the festival, and profited enormously from listening to Sheldon Pollock on the Sanskrit literary cosmopolis of a thousand years ago and Arvind Krishna Mehrotra on the state of Indian literary criticism, watching Naveen Kishore's film on Mahasweta Devi, learning from S.Anand and Omprakash Valmiki talk about Dalit literature. and hearing the electric sounds of Mahmood Farooqui and Danish Husain's dastangoi, the gravelly voice of Gulzar reading his poems, and the beautiful cadences and wit and rhetorical flair of Ashok Vajpeyi's Hindi.

In my experience, if there is a space where the festival is distorted, it's in its representation in the Indian media, which reports mostly on the big-name authors and ignores all the other riches on view, riches the worth of which our newspapers and magazines (and here Open is as guilty as anybody) should be doing their best to communicate to the lay reader.

I'd even meet Bal halfway, and grant that, buried deep somewhere in his unpersuasive and splenetic piece, he has a point about the larger power dynamics of Indian literature and publishing.

But if Bal really feels so passionately about Indian literature and how it remains a kind of satellite of the London literary establishment, looking westward for all its cues, then one would expect to see from his pen, alongside the work of attacking deeply entrenched interests and biases, pieces that advance the appreciation of actual Indian novels, plays, or poems, or that champion Indian writers who are unfairly neglected. But the only reading of an actual text that he offers anywhere in his work is that of William Dalrymple's bio on the festival website, one that he gleefully brings up again and again, as if by tracking it all our doubts and ambiguities can be magically resolved. This is just juvenile.

I've read some of Bal's other work, such as the essay on the Narmada river and Gond tribal narratives and artworks that he published in the Asia Literary Review in 2008, and found him, in this avatar, to be a much more complex and subtle writer than he comes across as being here. I'd like to submit (at the risk of discovering that he can no longer restrain his urge to reply in Punjabi) that, in crude jeremiads like this one, Bal is not only being unfair to William Dalrymple and the Jaipur Literary Festival, he is above all being unfair to himself.

And an old post from 2009: "A reply to Hartosh Singh Bal".

The Kitab Literary Festival, and a disquisition on boots

Starting tomorrow, we enter the last ten days of February, and as always this is the start of high literary season in Bombay. Everyone who has ever written a book or read one, thought about writing one, or even used one as a paperweight, backrest or flower-press will be out and about, going to awards ceremonies, panel discussions, seminars, and readings.

And there really is going to be something worth going to, as later this week a battalion of writers from around the world will turn up for the Kitab Literary Festival, from Friday the 23rd to Sunday the 25th of February. The full schedule is here.

There are a few events I'm looking forward to in particular:

The panel discussion "Veils and Miniskirts" (Friday, 12.30 to 1.30, Asiatic Library), featuring Germaine Greer, Urvashi Butalia and Kamila Shamsie among others

A chat between Hanif Kureishi and Ashok Row Kavi after the screening of My Beautiful Launderette (Friday, 2 to 4.30, Max Mueller Bhavan)

The screening of Anand Patwardhan's short film We are not Monkeys, followed by a discussion by Patwardhan, Farrukh Dhondy and Sujit Saraf on the use of religious symbols in art (Saturday, 1 to 2, Max Mueller Bhavan)

"Credentials Please", a discussion on writers and authenticity, with Geoff Dyer, Blake Morrison and Ranjit Hoskote among others (Saturday, 2 to 3, Max Mueller Bhavan)

Amit Chaudhuri in conversation with Ian Jack (Saturday, 3 to 4, Oxford Bookstore). Chaudhuri will also be performing with his band at Prithvi Café, Juhu, on Sunday, 6 to 7

A symposium on "World Literature", featuring Helen Cross, Dilip Chitre and Antara Dev Sen among others (Sunday, 1 to 2, Prithvi Café)

And most unusual of all, a Poetry in Performance Session with poets Jeet Thayil and Vivek Narayanan (Sunday, 3.30 to 4.30, Prithvi Café). I've heard both these poets in performance, and they're very good. Members of the public will be allowed to present their own poetry afterwards.

And lastly, Mumbai Meri Jaan! (Sunday, 7 to 9, Prithvi Theatre) featuring readings by Sonia Faleiro, Naresh Fernandes, and Eunice D'Souza among others

And the festival will be a landmark in my singularly uneventful life as well, because for the first time I'll be at a panel discussion where I'll actually be on the panel, and can speak as loudly as possible (as I like to do) instead of murmuring.

Yes indeed, I shall be one of several people asked to pontificate on the subject "What's the future of literary criticism in India and Britain?" on Saturday the 24th at the NCPA, 10am to 11.30 am. Come along, if for nothing else then to get a good seat for the discussion to follow right after on "The Role of the Writer", which is sure to be packed, as it will feature many Beauteous, Handsome and Important people in conversation.

I'm not sure what I'm going to say at the discussion, or if I'm going to say anything at all - as everyone knows, I'm an exceedingly quiet person, and speak only when spoken to - but secretly, all I ask and pray for is that, even if they line us all up in chairs, there isn't a long table in front of us, of the kind seen at dining halls and symposiums. The reason for this is that I plan to wear on this great day a pair of very natty boots I bought recently - long, pointy size 11s, peeping out from under the fall of my trousers like crocodiles half-sunning themselves beneath trees - and what would be the point of it if no one could see them?

As everyone knows, the three things that most determine one's general mood in life are one's choice of career, life partner, and - last and least, to be sure, but important nonetheless - shoes. I had a excellent conversation on this very subject with Jeet Thayil at Jaipur last month, and found him to be even more zealous than me on this theme - look out for his splendid boots when he reads on Sunday. I bought these boots of mine after great deliberation and at great expense, and immediately grew to care for them as a parent cares for a child. I'd polish them before I went out and, solicitous of their wellbeing, polish them again after I came home. I kicked no stones on the streets, and avoided all crowded places, where lesser shoes might stamp on them.

Thus it was that, when a reporter from the Guwahati Herald called last week for an interview (I don't know why - possibly they ran out of people to interview in Guwahati) and asked me, among other things, what my most prized possessions were, I naturally said "My boots". Imagine then my surprise when I looked at the paper a few days later to find my answer mysteriously rendered as, "My books". How ridiculous - why would they ever think that?

So, anyway, as we've got to chatting, I might as well tell you about some other things I've been up to recently, and if you want to do the same you can catch me on Saturday, and I'll hear you out.

I don't often write about art - nobody asks, and I'm not much good anyways - but a couple of weeks ago I did a piece on Atul Dodiya for Tehelka, which you can find here. And I don't often work in the movies - nobody offers, and indeed why should they - but last month I assisted my filmmaker friend Rustom Irani on a short for a competition called the Genesis Film Project, and it was selected as one of the prizewinning entries. It's going to be screened tomorrow evening at Zenzi, and I'm listed on the credits as Creative Advisor - like all undeserved praise, this exaggeration pleased me very much.

All right, I don't know if you've got all sorts of things waiting to be taken care of, but I certainly have, as it's almost time for the weekly polishing of my boots. See you later this week at Kitab.