Lettered tussle of the wordly wise  

What happens when you find yourself sitting next to a bulky person whose extended dimensions inadvertently occupy most part of your seat! A silent struggle ensues. It begins from the arm rest. You try to push back as much bulk as you can to reclaim your space. Unfortunately, i lacked the matching circumference. So, I was gave in under the pressure. Similar to the squeeze felt by the small scale publishers under the bulge of the English global publishing. The push was not intended, it was there all the same. Unplanned, uncalculated, unwanted and uncherished. The parallels became obvious on my flight back from Jaipur, after attending the seventh chapter of Zee Jaipur Literature Festival. This was my fourth year at JLF. And the hegemony of English mainstream literary activity was overheard across other literary voices. It was underlined in many sessions through the course of Zee JLF.

 Not that it was intentional, but i felt compressed by the presence of the other passenger. Which, to say the least was pervasive.

Despite an exceptionally cold weather for the desert city, on the first day  the Front Lawns were choked to capacity at Diggi Palace. People stood patiently to listen to Dr Amrtya Sen’s keynote address that dissected multiple issues confronting India, with a literary scissor.  

Not missing the opportunity to show his imaginative side, Dr Sen  narrated a fictional account “A Wish A Day for A Week,” of his meeting with  “The goddess of Large Things”, with a pun on Arundhati Rai’s popular novel “God of Small Things”, after he learnt that India has joined the elite club with the launch of the successful GSLV-DV. But, because his demands were medium sized, he called the Goddess GMT( Goddess of medium things). His dialogue with GMT on the JLF went like this, “I am going to the Jaipur Literature Festival. You have heard of the famous Jaipur Literature Festival, my goddess?” “Yes,” GMT said, “but it is really so big now that it has been moved from my care to the care of the Goddess of Large Things. Still, I will try to help you. Make a medium-sized wish about literature.” So I jumped in: “Classical education in language, literature, music and the arts are being seriously neglected in India...”

Exploring full potential of pun and sarcasm, Dr Sen enlightened the audience with his witty observations on the contemporary issues – from less respect for humanities in our education system to the need for a right wing political party without religious overtones to the dilemmas of the media and the sexual violence against women in India. “A novel can point to a truth without pretending to capture it exactly in some imagined numbers and formulae,” he observed, hinting at the precedence of empirical studies over literature. He stressed upon the need to give more impetus to the studies of humanities, art and languages.

As though, the boons granted to him by the GMT, JLF witnessed different stream, as diverse as economics, medicine, science and history merge into the ocean of literature.   

Lost voices

Literature grapples with reality, not only by creating a world of fantasy to bring about a semblance of balance in life – language—it’s very vehicle struggles with challenges of a different kind. Because writing is a relatively short phase that entered much later in the long life of languages which evolved primarily for the purpose of orality. In their written script, languages got associated with education, employment, religion and the politics of it all, thereby threatening their existence. “Writing India Speaking Bharat” deliberated upon the plurality and richness of languages India speaks, and the homogenisation of the written word. The very coining of the title pricked layers of hypocrisy associated with our language culture and related policies.

Many languages of the world are eclipsed by the global umbrella of English, it worries the world of literature more than ever before. When a language disappears, with it an entire world view is lost. Languages grow organically-- the many coastal languages of India, now on the brink of extinction-- had enriched their expressions with the intermingling of languages of the travelling traders and merchants. The many words for different shades of ‘white’ could evolve only in the Antarctic region. Therefore, the looming fear for the loss of about 4000 languages of the world within the next 80 years would mean fewer expressions available to humanity to express a complex gamut of human experience across globe. It would mean clipping the wings of imagination and expression.

Dr Ganesh Devy, who initiated the first ever People’s Linguistic Survey of India( PLSI) and re-established existence of 870 Indian languages, as against 122 languages under the 2001 Census conducted by Government of India, following a 40-year old policy of omitting languages with less than 10,000 speakers, concluded, as long as even six people speak a language, it should be treated alive, because, “policies cannot create or sustain a language, people do.” And declaring death of a spoken language is as good as declaring a living human to be dead. While introducing an attentive audience to the vanishing languages from India’s cultural landscape, Dr Devy also delighted the audience when he informed, the speakers of Hindi make a greater number than the speakers of English-- as the first language. English is gaining popularity primarily as a second language, which means it squeezes the first languages to make room for itself. He cautioned the audience to the looming dangers of a monoculture that results in the death of pluralism and hence the death of diverse languages.

Language of the displaced

 While Dr Devy urged  people to demand for their language right as a basic citizen right, Pulitzer Prize winner author Jhumpa Lahiri had a different take on the homogenised language scenario, “Commercial currency of English is distressing” said the author of two English novels “The Namesake” and “The Lowland” and two short story collections “Interpreter of Maladies” and “Unaccustomed Earth.”  Jhumpa is writing her next book in Italian, which she likes to call a ‘linguistic biography.’ It is going to be a thin book about her growing relationship with a new language—which lacks global proportions of English. Her move from the realm of familiarity to the unfamiliar, which also happens to be smaller may surprise her readers, familiar with the fine embellishment of her English writing, but this is Jhumpa’s literary statement against the shock she received when she migrated to Italy a few years back. “To my surprise I found seven to eight best-selling novels published in Italy annually are in English. I have stopped reading anything in English for the last two years to discover many wonderful books written in languages other than English,” she adds.

Does globalisation lead to a mono culture, in terms of literature too, she offered a different take on the issue, “No matter how many malls you visit, how many global brands you may wear, your language remains your limiting part and it should be respected. Because it’s a powerful restriction. One must respect the power of a specific language that comes with a specific culture. I grew up seeing my parents miss Kolkata and everything Bengali, it was as powerful as missing a person and I felt an acute sense of helplessness.”       

Commenting on the creative linguistic dilemmas of people like her, which is common globally among writers  who cannot use their first language for creative expression nor could claim their second language as their own, she said, “I am a writer without a 100 per cent language I could call my own. I was born Bengali but never lived in India, I write in English because I was educated in English. Without language I am nobody, I never had a homeland—in addition, language is a part of that.”     

   With the overrated American novel and everything that gets published in English getting a wider, easily available readership , the challenge before the alternative literature is to grow powerful ( not in size alone) to make a point and eventually create a level-playing field. The silver lining is drawn by the writers like Maaza Mengiste, an Ethiopian writer who is researching works from 200 different Ethiopian languages and making them available through translations. She said, “ Global combines elements from the world, therefore diversity should not grow vertically, nor should it be allowed to be static.“ Despite the fact that most of the writers available in English come from metropolises and cater to a certain kind of readership the diversity of literary voices will not die because as Jim Crace, author of “Harvest” would put it, “You can sing only in your own voice.” This is also proved by this year’s Nobel recipient Alice Munro, who continues to write about the small town Canadian life with great insight and intensity.

    

 Call it the power of the bulge or muscle flexing, smaller imprints that work tediously to discover fresh literary voices are feeling the crunch. The anxiety of smaller publications is compounded by mergers between the global publishers.     

A delegate at the inaugural edition of “Jaipur BookMark”-- a platform created for publishing professionals from India and around the world, which was running parallel to JLF informed, a complex network of lobbying goes behind the awards, which is easier on big time agents and powerful publishers rather than the smaller imprints. A prestigious award catapults the book into the best-selling category. Though, what defines a best- seller remains under a cloud and the number that could put a book into that coveted category varies between publishers, countries and the language of the literary work.

Writing is not the lonely process of creativity alone, a lot happens post-writing influenced by the demands of the market economy. Pre-agent specialists are mushrooming to help prune the book before it lands with an agent and self-publishing is growing as the new success mantra. Amish Tripathi talked of the uncountable rejection slips he received for “The Immortals of Meluha” and decided to go to the readers directly. It went on to sell 40,000 copies. Anand Neelkanthan’s “Asura Tale of the Vanquished”, nominated for DSC Prize, published by  Leadstar, a small publishing house from Mumbai, became a surprise bestseller. Both writers are picked by Random House now.

Scores of ventures in self publishing like Zorba, Pothi, Cinnamon Teal and Notion Press offer range of services from editing to copyright registration for a fee. At BookMark, delegates offered suggestions on how global and independent publishing houses can continue to co-exist in the growing Indian market, by taking advantage of collaborations and technology to reach a larger segment of readership. And to lend local flavour to the global networks.

Writers are struggling, even from the fatter languages to strike a chord with the reader. Travel -- the mother of all writing — is undergoing a complete shift. Gone are the days of the male voyager, who travelled far to vanquish the enemy and returned a transformed man. The tales of the “Ulysses” or “The Old Man and the sea” are taken over  by restless women who take up long, solitary journeys, not to vanquish an outside enemy but to fight the fears within. Cheryl Strayed wrote “Wild : From Lost to Found” and “Torch” based on her daring trek on the Pacific Crest Trail, for which she trekked 1100 miles. Robyn Davidson, who came to be known as the camel woman wrote, ”Tracks” after her 1700 mile trek through the desert of the Australian outback.

     

After demons and angels and the myths, gods make another interesting subject to explore. Long queues were seen for the book signing of Reza Aslan’s  # 1 New York Times Bestseller book on Christ “Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth”, and the author was christened as a superhero by Dalrymple. Aslan is planning to explore the birth of the concept of god in the country that created a million gods — India, for his next book.

With a deluge of writing genres, that includes a new genre of ‘writers writing on writers’, crime writers created an association at JLF to help each other- not with crime- but to find agents, publishers etc on crime writing. The Crime Writers’ Association of South Asia planned a weekend festival of crime writing in Delhi, to be held in September. Sooner, one could expect genre specific lit fests after seeing 60 photocopies of the Jaipur lit fest across country.

Compared to the previous years, there were fewer events devoted to the vernacular. Javed Akhtar and Gulzar, the crowd pullers were not there, an enriching session with Narendra Kohli compensated the loss.

Traditionally, the festival comes to an end with an open Darbar. Despite rains that tried their best to work as a spoiler this year, people assembled with enthusiasm at the Darbar hall. Traditionally, the debate comes to a conclusion on the beats of a nagada. But here, at JLF even tootis get heard amidst the nagaras. Everyone has a voice and everyone gets heard.