A festival of colours, ideas and lots of people

For people in Nigeria, India is synonymous with two things, if not more. Colours and people. Lots of people. And these two things were amply reflected at the 11th edition of the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival, which held in the “Pink City” of Jaipur, Rajasthan in the North of India. I have had the good […]

For people in Nigeria, India is synonymous with two things, if not more. Colours and people. Lots of people. And these two things were amply reflected at the 11th edition of the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival, which held in the “Pink City” of Jaipur, Rajasthan in the North of India.

I have had the good fortune of speaking at numerous literature festivals across the world, all the major ones, I think, and clearly every festival has its peculiarities. But still, Jaipur manages to be something special. It is almost not a festival but a carnival. At least 390 speakers from India and the rest of the world were invited. Tens of thousands came to see them speak. And what a show they put on. It is no mistake that the festival has been described as “the greatest literary show on earth.” There was, certainly, a good reason for that.

When the invitation came, William Dalrymple, festival director and author of over 10 books, including City of Djinns, had promised, “elephant parades and palaces,” among other things. And when I walked into Shahpura House, where I was lodged for the duration of my stay, it was akin to a palace. 

Rajasthan is famed for its monarchies, tradition, palaces and forts, and its unique pink buildings that give Jaipur its nickname. These are visible in the architecture of many of the hotels in the city, fashioned like the palaces of the maharajas of old, with marble decors, garlands for guests, and exquisite floral designs in every available space.

Rajasthan is proud and this pride is showcased with some flamboyance. Rajasthan is the peacock of India and it is no surprise to see this elegant creature exhibited in the motif of this city and the festival as well.

Incidentally, this ancient pride was being tested at the time of my visit. 

One of the first words I learnt-from reading Indian dailies splayed on a table in my hotel room-was jowhar. A worried friend said I must be careful about saying the word. The precise nature of his apprehension escaped me since jowhar was being bandied just about everywhere. I thought the word and the concept of it fascinating. Jowhar is suicide by self-immolation. 

In the news there were reports of 200 or so women who had gone to the Chittor Fort “seeking permission” to commit mass suicide by setting themselves afire in protest over the planned release of a controversial Bollywood blockbuster movie, Padmaavat.

The movies’ offence, according to reports, was the “inaccurate depiction” of a Rajput queen, who in ancient times committed jowhar, alongside other women in her palace, rather than submit to the Sultan of Delhi, who had conquered the city. 

Incidentally, Malaysia, a predominantly Muslim country, would ban the movie over the depiction of the Sultan of Delhi as a mindless, meat guzzling savage. In the movie trailer I saw the sultan was projected as an Indian version of Khal Drogo.

Fortunately, none of the 200 selfie-taking protesters at the fort committed Jowhar, and none has so far. Yet, it is remarkable how one movie could successfully rile up both Hindus and Muslims at the same time.

But I digress.

The Zee Jaipur Literature Festival opened with pomp and the intellectual discourse matched, if not surpassed, the colours and vibrancy of the décor. The halls were packed, and these were rather large halls. Often dozens of people had to stand because there were no more seats available. The videos of the events available on the festival website capture the image better.

I had four events, the first, introducing the brilliant Charlie English, who had written a non-fiction work on The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu, the brave men who took great risks to save the Timbuktu manuscripts from the marauding Al-Qaida invaders, who took the Malian city and seemed intent on destroying its rich heritage and centuries-old handwritten manuscript.

My second panel discussion, The Empire Writes Back, (movie-like title, I know) was moderated by the amazing Pico Iyer and featured myself, Burmese-American writer Charmaine Craig, Indian poet and novelist Jeet Thayil and Canadian novelist Linda Spalding.

It threw up lots of issues of language and storytelling from countries once colonised by Britain. My position, was that there was no way civilizations, like the ones in India, and West Africa at the time, could endure the centuries of orchestrated interruption that was slavery and colonisation, in which scholarly traditions that have existed for epochs were suddenly declared bad, the languages proclaimed vernacular and the story and the learned men and women of these places dismissed as illiterates because they don’t speak or write the language of their colonisers, can suddenly regain their swagger with the departure of these intruders. We are now learning to read and write and tell our stories in a new language, appropriating this language and bending it to meet our peculiar story-telling needs.

At the end of the hour-long session, I did feel that if we had had two or three more hours to debate the issues, we would still not have exhausted them. But for the thousands of people who attended that session at the Front Lawn of the Diggi Palace, the biggest venue of the festival, there was so much to take away from that conversation.

Indian novelist and columnist, Chandrahas Choudhury moderated my next session, “Reinventing the Novel” with Charmaine Craig, yet again and my compatriot Chika Unigwe as well as Linda Spalding.

Early on, we all came to the conclusion that this was a subject that could not be exhausted in an hour and so the conversation veered to explorable grounds, to probe our writings and methods, and our inspiration, as if these things are fixed, as if they are not lords unto themselves and a writer is often the clay his muse and story mould.

I had no idea that one writer I have always admired for long, Michael Ondaatje, author of the Booker winning, The English Patient, among many other fabulous books, was at the rear of the hall, sitting in on our session. Afterwards, we met and struck up a conversation about some of the books I had mentioned reading in my teenage years and the influence they had on me and how the same books had also influenced him so much so that he had re-read them recently.

 Sadly that conversation could not go on for long as we both had to rush off to other sessions, me to my last, “The Afropolitans,” in which I was in conversation with the other Africans at the festival, Chika Unigwe and British Somali writer Nadifa Mohammed moderated by Nigerian-born Bangladeshi-American Abeer Hoque.

In this we revelled, we knocked the concept of Afropolitanism and quickly threw it out the window. It was a term none of us related with, even if it was a reality for some writers. Afropolitanism, as a concept, has been trending since Taiye Selasi wrote her 2005 essay. That it has had this much staying power and has been the subject of conversations over the last decade is a credit to the author of the concept.

For me, it is one of those labels, a reaction or a counter argument to poverty porn, in which Africans wear Versace and Gucci and party in Rome and Milan, New York and Paris as opposed to those who wear rags and languish in refugee camps. African reality cannot be captured in these two labels, because, when considered, even cursorily, it is a spectrum, a range of realities, layers and layers of reality in fact that the concept of “the African novel” is laughable and a writer from the continent, most often, writes about realities of particular spaces and people and can therefore not be taken as representative of the entire continent.

This was my approach to the constant questions of what my impression of India was. India does not fit into this or that label, because India is complex, its people and cultures and religions are layers of complexities that a visitor can unpack in a few days of visit. Perhaps Dalrymple, a historian, son of Scottish aristocrats, who has lived on and off in India since 1989, and has written extensively about the country, can venture to answer questions like that but I am sure not even him, and most certainly not most Indians, can lay claim to a mastery of the complexities of that country. India is unlike any country I have been to, but it is like every other country because it doesn’t have a single story. I can relate with this because that is my sentiment about Nigeria as well.

But the Jaipur Literature Festival is a unique window into India, into the minds of its writers and thinkers and into their works and how Indians, a lot of them young people, engage with the literature of the rest of the world. One thing you are sure to get though is a huge crowd, so huge that sometimes it is a bit disconcerting.

Delhi

In Delhi, my Indian publishers, Speaking Tiger collaborated with the Nigerian High Commission to host a reception in my honour. The occasion also served as a launch of the Indian edition of my novel Season of Crimson Blossoms.

It was a strange evening. One that, despite its Nigerian flavour, even in faraway India, served as a moment of pride for me in my country. It served to show the Indians how Nigerian book launches roll, with the long speeches and the book clear-outs.

During the course of my interview session that evening with the brilliant Nandini Nair, a deputy editor of Open Magazine, a lot of issues from the book were thrown up.

His Excellency Chris Eze, the High Commissioner, who had been very keen on hosting the event, recounted his experiences in Jos, during the 2001 riots, when he was a colonel in the Nigerian army, and was shot twice while on a mission to restore peace. He lived to retire as a general, became a politician and now a diplomat.

What struck me about this man and his enthusiasm was his realisation of the power of cultural diplomacy in reshaping perceptions about people, something I have seen many embassies in Nigeria practice. That through literatures and writers, stereotypes can be countered and my presence in India was an opportunity to project another image of Nigeria. He led other Nigerians and Indians that night to buy up the copies of the book available that evening.

Perhaps what the HC did not realise was the impression of Nigeria he has imprinted in my mind. And it is a very good one, I tell you.