Hope is the feathered thing—as Emily Dickinson put it. But on a Saturday afternoon at the Jaipur Literature Festival, it was a packed Durbar Hall. The session was a conversation between poets Akhil Katyal and Meena Kandasamy on The World That Belongs To Us: An Anthology of Queer Poetry in South Asia. It began with the reading of a poem of Ramchandra Siras, the Aligarh professor who took his life for being identified as homosexual. As the session ended, a boy stood up and asked Katyal to read a poem, shouting “I love you” when he did. The atmosphere was electric. The queue for the signing of their books was satisfyingly snake-like and stretched across the room. If there was ever an Instagram-worthy picture that could capture that elusive feeling of hope, it was that queue.
Back after two years of the pandemic, JLF has stepped into a world that has been altered forever. It comes at a time when physical events struggle to remain relevant. The venue is no longer the magical Diggi Palace in Jaipur, where the drama of the building added to its charm. The Clarks Amer is very much a hotel—with sprawling grounds to turn it into a whimsical writerly world. In the past two years the virtual has come to dominate the real world. When authors are virtually accessible, on screen constantly sans their books, are on-ground festivals even needed? This was the question that hung in the air, unasked, even as readers thronged the grounds.
The pandemic has been tough on publishing. The festival—which had been postponed to March—came at a time when Amazon has announced the closure of Westland Books. While reading is essential, the pandemic has proved that it does not necessarily turn into sales. But if a doubt ever existed, the 10-day-long festival—a week on the ground—reaffirmed the need for a books jamboree, not in its star limelight moments, although those are important too, but in the small, life-affirming acts that could only happen in a space for reading.
Everyone had such a favourite JLF moment. The time when Rana Safvi— historian, food lover and writer—met Nobel-winning economist and writer Abhijit Banerjee and got his recipe book autographed—very much as just a reader. “There is the element of chance,’’ says Krishan Chopra, editor-in-chief, Bloomsbury. “You don’t meet online. You can’t go up to an author as a publisher or just as a fan. Books are all about possibilities, about a spirit of adventure.” The Safvi-Banerjee meeting that captured that sense of possibility and became a poster-perfect moment found itself on Twitter. But there were those that never did.
“There was this moment when the blind flautist Rajendra opened the session on disability,” says Sanjoy Roy, managing director, Teamwork Art. “When asked if he faced any challenges, he said, ‘None’. He said he only wanted to pursue his education. Mohit Satyanand, an angel investor, immediately offered support.”
But beyond the tangible—where hope is actually graspable—there are those moments where the change happens quietly, but is just as essential. “For me, that moment was at the end of Kristín Ragna Gunnarsdóttir’s session, where a young boy revealed an amazing philosophical and factual knowledge of Norse and Icelandic mythology,” says Namita Gokhale, festival director. “The audience clapped. It is the young at JLF who are the foundations of my inspiration.”
Much more than the star writers and the charged debates, it is the audience and the energy—absent in virtual—that make the on-ground festival worth the trek. At JLF they thronged. At the Kolkata Book Fair, they bought books worth Rs20 crore. They came, they heard, they changed and were the change. And perhaps, the most moving moment was during Katyal and Kandasamy’s session, when a girl stood up and inquired whether asking for a public reading of a poem from the queer anthology would identify her as queer. It was a question that was brave and required courage. It was also one that singled her out for standing out—for wanting to be seen. It was a moment of acceptance, of the sheer power of poetry to be seen and of community. And one that laid bare the essential need for a physical festival. The question could never have had the same life-changing effect on Zoom. “People come and then, they step into life,” says Gokhale.