Homecoming, Vernacular writers and a thousand pities

A unique literary festival, first of its kind in India, was held in Delhi and Nimarana from 18th to 26th of February this year. It was to celebrate “the abundance and diversity of literary India”, and was attended by an impressive gathering of writers whose list read like a veritable who’s who of Indian writers – those who write in regional languages, those who write in English, and other writers of the Indian diaspora. Among those present were Sir V.S. Naipaul, Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Amit Chowdhury, Khuswant Singh, I.Allan Sealy, Farukh Dhondy, Pico Iyer, Kiran Nagerkar, U.R. Ananthamurthy, M.T.Madhaban Nair, Sunil Gangopadhyay and Ashokamitran.

The festival, organised by ICCR, was really planned with writers of the Indian diaspora in mind. And indeed the whole lot of them – except Salman Rushdie – came back home to attend it. It provided them the opportunity to have a fresh look at their roots, and collect material and gain fresh insights for their future work. They naturally talked a lot about their favorite themes: angst, identity, exile and Indianness. The idea of exile has an extended connotation now: it is no longer limited to physical dislocation. Exile, they said, is a country by itself, and of course a state of being. One greatly missed Salman Rushdie, the perpetual immigrant among our writers, who would have certainly added a dash of color to this festival. Sir Vidia, the Nobel laureate, who came to attend the festival along with his wife Nadira, and some of his friends, was naturally the star attraction of the festival. True to his self, he did not really maintain any courtesy and decorum, and held forth what he felt right in his perception. Not known to sugar coat his words,he came down heavily with those writers who still dabbled with colonialism and gender bias in Indian writing in English. His manner of interfering in the middle of discussion was of course offending, but he brought home the literary truth that these things hardly mattered so far as writing was concerned. So why must a writer bother about these elements at all? And did these writers really believe in what they were speaking out?

For vernacular writers, it was an occasion of airing their much-elated views of the regional literature, and of their anger and frustration, many of which directed against those writing in English, the language of their colonial masters. Predictably, the festival opened up an old debate: who are the more authentic of writers – those who write in English, or those who write in vernaculars?

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