Literature festivals in India recently got free global PR when a foreign newspaper wrote about them. Suddenly everyone, including those who had never been to a lit fest, has an opinion on this. First come those who run them. Huh, they went, If Indians don’t read then who are all these people crowding our venues? Then the layman retaliated— since all laymen in India are Indians and, like all Indians, did not like being lumped together in one facelessmass called ‘Indians’. Bookshops brought up the matter of sales, climbing every day. The eyebrows of publishers, editors, publicists, book reviewers and influencers who make a living off recommending books shot up. With bookworms reacting the last because they were busy, well, reading. The response was so swift, so brutal, so verbose, that the paper had to change the headline of its piece.
og’ move, The Guardian recently decided to be provocative in a piece headlined ‘Most Indians don’t read for pleasure—so why does the country have 100 literature festivals?’ This is what it said in order to get our goat: ‘At the country’s more than 100 literary gatherings, books are promoted with great fanfare, but spectacle takes pride of place.’ No spectacle a desi litfest ever put up can equal the spectacle this article caused in the country. The accusation was nothing less than a sizzling number by Helen in the villain’s den or the scene in which Ranveer Singh outwits Rehman Dakait on a wrong turning in Dhurandhar.
Every Indian sat up and wrote an editorial. It could be the colonial hangover, it could be a kneejerk reaction to an ancestor’s jail time during British Raj—whatever it was, everyone had something to say. We were angry and hurt. They set up our schools and gave us the syllabus. So, in an accent we picked up at a stopover in Heathrow, we ask again and again: ‘Whatever gave you the daft idea, old chap?
India and the UK have roughly the same number of lit fests. British writers and artists visit India in hordes every year, and are distributed unevenly across our festivals. Just like our writers and artists apply for a visa to travel abroad with their work. In an average Indian lit fest, there is a 20 to 30 per cent foreign representation, out of which 90 per cent are Scottish or Irish. And while the Cheltenham Literature Festival, started in 1949, may be quoted as the very first lit fest ever in the world, Bharat has had goshthis, mehfils and sahitya sammelans way, way before that. Largely in Indian languages. Yes, we take the Bard seriously and make umpteen movies on his plays and quote him pompously every chance we get, but we also stun the world routinely with our translations. And no one writes without reading. Books beget books.
We learn to read young—because memorising is a way of academic life here. I just about cleared every maths exam in school by by-hearting whole equations that filled the examiner’s eyes with tears. Till I switched over to literature in college, I lived a spy Vs spy life with my science and maths teachers. I still wake up at night in cold sweat over ‘algebra’ and ‘Bunsen burner’—the dragons in my fairy tale.
We argue, that’s what Indians do. For which we need to read. So, maybe we don’t read for pleasure. But what the backlash and the changed headline prove is we do read. Every word. Every. Don’t make us give up Brit spellings and follow American ones.