Jaipur Literary Festival Day 1

Entrance to the JLF

Bant Singh (in wheelchair) 

John and Cathy

Dinner at the Rambagh Palace

After breakfast we headed to day 1 of the Jaipur Literary Festival. It started slowly for us, and the sessions got better and better. The Keynote address was by Margaret Attwood. She didn’t excite me. I thought her speech was rather pedestrian. Enough said.

The next session was an improvement. It was entitled The Pakistan Paradox. India and Pakistan have fought 3 wars. Each country has a foreign policy that is obsessed by fear of the other country. Underneath it all, they are basically similar South East Asians. The paradoxes that were presented were strained in my opinion. The most interesting insight, and I don’t know if it is correct or not was: Pakistan from its inception was inspired by the dream that it would be the center of the Muslim world: The New Medina. Like the Ottoman Empire before, a non-Arab Pakistan would replace Saudi Arabia and the Arab hold over the Muslim mindset. The panelist all agreed that Pakistan has to reform its Madrassas (religious schools), Public Schools and textbooks. The power of the army of democratic institutions had to be curbed.

The next session was extremely powerful. It was entitled: The Ballad of Bant Singh. Bant Singh is from the Punjab and is a dalit who was a farmer and singer. Dalit means oppressed and it is the name in India for people of untouchable caste. This very low caste is highly discriminated against. In his village it is common for landowning owning upper caste boys to rape dalit girls with impunity. After his minor daughter was raped by some powerful men in 2000, he dared take them to court, an unusual occurrence when a Dalit is raped by a non-Dalit, braving threats of violence and attempted bribes. The trial culminated in life sentences for three of the culprits in 2004, the first time that a Dalit from the region who had complained against upper-caste violence had managed to secure a conviction.

On the evening of 7 January 2006 Bant Singh was returning home through some wheat fields. He had just been campaigning for a national agricultural labor rally to be held in Andhra Pradesh in January. He was suddenly waylaid by a gang of seven men. One of them brandished a revolver to prevent any resistance while the other six set upon him with iron rods and axes beating him to pulp.

He was left for dead, however, Bant Singh was alive, though barely.

He was first taken to civil hospital in Mansa but was not given proper treatment there. Then he was taken to the PGI at Chandigarh, where both lower arms and one leg had to be amputated since gangrene had set in by then, and his kidneys had collapsed due to blood loss.

Bant wheelchair was lifted to the interview stage and in a big booming voice he sang out a song of resistance. The interview was mostly in hindi, and we couldn’t understand it, but translation was not necessary. This man’s courage is amazing. He is a labor organizer and activist. His life is an inspiration. It was a powerful experience.

Karen Johar was the subject of the next panel we wanted to attended, it was to be held in the great lawn the largest venue at Diggi Palace. We arrived early and listened to the Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith being interviewed by William Dalrymple. Smith is a writer of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series among other books. He is a fabulous storyteller and the audience was in stitches as he spoke. We ran into John our friend from San Francisco who we will be seeing in Jaipur.

The next session was an interview with Karen Johar. Karen is a director of popular Bollywood movies. Most of them are successful schlock. India has a very repressive anti-gay law 377, leftover from the English Raj. It also has very complicated censorship laws. Freedom of speech is not a guaranteed right in India. Karen has made several movies with gay themes. For a long time the rumors of his sexuality have been the gossip of Bollywood. There were thousands of people in the audience. It was jammed. It was like a rock concert. The interviewer explained how Karen’s new biography: An Unsuitable Boy, was a no-holds bar look at his life. Further she said he would answer any question. The entire audience was primed to hear the question: Are you gay? It was never directly asked, I assume because of politeness of the interviewer. However she asked question after question that let Karen use double entendres, winks and nods to say obviously I am gay. The audience loved it. In the final Q&A a women castigated him for using openly gays characters in movies but with stereotype that weren’t positive. Karen explained that the struggle in India for gay rights will be long an difficult, but that by being one of the first directors to have openly gay characters he has opened the door to even the possibility of discussing gay subjects in public.

The last session of the day was the very best. It was entitled Farewell Kabul. Christina Lamb is a bestselling author and one of Britain’s leading foreign correspondents. Since starting out in Peshawar where her dispatches with the Afghan mujaheddin fighting the Russians saw her named Young Journalist of the Year in the British Press Awards in 1988, she has won Foreign Correspondent of the Year five times as well as the Prix Bayeux, Europe’s most prestigious award for war correspondents and was awarded an OBE by the Queen in 2013. Since the 1980’s she has covered Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. She is brilliant and insightful. She explained how the ever-shifting grounds for the West’s involvement and justification for the Afghanistan War has lead to a hopeless situation. She feels that countries pursue their own long interests and have made temporary alliances with the West to achieve short-term goals but none the less they have longer strategic goals they really want to achieve. Her new book: Farewell Kabul, is one I will definitely read. I also want to re-watch this interview when it is placed on-line, as are all of the sessions at the Jaipur Literary Festival.

The three of us departed the venue and met Vijay our driver who dropped Cathy and I off at the Rambagh Palace and took John to his hotel. Our friend Shumon flew in from Bangladesh to join us for the festival. Cathy and I cleaned up and went to the bar for well deserved drinks, John and Shumon later joined us for dinner at the Rambagh. The food was excellent and Shumon got to interrogate the chef to discover the recipe for a delicious spinach and corn dish we had ordered. Can’t wait for him to make it for us in Los Angeles. It was a great first day at the Lit Festival.