How much liberty should one take with literature to expand its boundaries beyond reasonable limits? And, related to it, should politics be allowed to make inroads into the rarefied sanctum of arts and literature and take them under its wings? Both these questions came to a head at the just-ended 7th Karachi Literature Festival (KLF) which has acquired the gravitas of literature and arts’ gold standard in Pakistan since its 2010 launching. KLF, a mirror image of Jaipur Literature Festival in next door India, was initially intended to bring together luminaries of letters — those with well-established reputations in that esoteric world, as well as those trying to make their mark with the power of their pen.
However, once out of its teething woes — and having established its credentials with the harassed denizens of Karachi starved for fresh air of arts and literature in a city virtually taken over by goons and terrorists — KLF quickly took on extra dimensions by casting its net around. It became a magnet to attract the practitioners of other arts too. It was a smart move and made a lot of sense — both artistic and commercial. If writers, poets and critics were creative so were performing artistes: singers, dancers, film makers and artists. It brought in a lot more people flocking to the festival offering a large market to art aficionados to pick and choose their own icons. Attendance to the festivals’ various sessions soared. So did the business of down-streamers: food vendors, book-sellers, etc.
It became a haven for art lovers, book worms and foodies. The move also opened the KLF’s portals to artistes, performers and literati from across the Divide. Big names from Indian cinema and the world of journalism became popular attractions to Karachi’s esoteric cultural crowd. The organisers seemed to tell Pakistan’s political masters that they were determined to build bridges of culture to span the distance separating the two peoples much quicker than the accidents and hiccups-prone political process could ever have dreamed of. This year’s festival — February 5 to 7 — list of heavy-weight Indians had a lot of heft too. There was Salman Khurshid, the ex-FM of India whose recent book, The Other Side of the Mountain, was launched in front of a discerning audience. There was the outspoken and brash Barkha Dutt, the iron lady of the galaxy of Indian TV anchors who has cultivated a rich crop of her admirers in Pakistan, too. They love her hard-hitting, finger-jabbing, no-holds-barred and no-punches-pulled style of hammering her quarries, just as they crave many of their own in Barkha’s unabashed league. She came armed with her own recently minted book, This Unique Land.
Barkha’s popularity with the Karachi audience may be plumbed from the milling crowd her on-stage open session attracted; it was virtually standing-room only, and they lustily cheered her on as she spun out her discourse without mincing words. The organisers were so eclectic in their choice of 17 Indian luminaries that they also invited India’s star transgender activist Laxmi Tripathi to unveil her autobiography at the festival.
But the man who was supposed to have the star-billing at the festival wasn’t there. Anupam Kher, the versatile thespian and virtuoso artiste of a thousand different faces on India’s large Silver Screen was only too conspicuous by his absence. The 7th KLF would go down in history as the saga of Anupam Kher’s no-show at a gathering where his presence was keenly anticipated. What went wrong with his attendance, and why did his no-show quickly mutate into a political drama?
A lot of conflicting evidence has already been kicked up to make what was supposed to be an apolitical and thoroughly cultural ambience murky and petrified. Kher says he was denied a visa to Pakistan by its High Commission in Delhi; the HC says Kher never applied for a visa. Its spokesman dared him to produce his visa application receipt if he did.
Kher couldn’t come up with a receipt. Someone at Twitter, with sharp wit and sense of humour befitting Kher, came close to hitting the nail on its head. Kher, it said, thought a visa was like the Padma Shree award, given without applying for it. Kher also aggravated the issue by obfuscating and lacing it with political spin. He pilloried the Pakistani authorities for getting cold feet because of his Kashmiri pundit provenance; they feared, he argued, that he may “expose Pakistan’s terror network.” Kher, with his huge and discerning fan club in Pakistan because of his versatile talent as an actor, was least expected to become a spoil-sport and politicise what was most likely a case of bureaucratic bungling. He had won the hearts of millions of Pakistanis in their national tragedy, in December 2014, when he published an open letter in the Indian press denouncing the blood-thirsty Taliban terrorists for the slaughter of more than 140 Pakistani children at Peshawar’s Army Public School. He’d empathised with Pakistan for being a victim of wanton terrorism.
Why should he squander all that trust by now threatening to ‘expose’ Pakistan’s terror network? Is he eyeing a political career for himself now that his wife is already a sitting BJP MP? Did he seek to ingratiate himself with the Hindutva lobby by playing up to their fixation on Pakistan and its terrorism nexus? Was it a corollary to his recent nose-thumbing at the versatile Aamir Khan for putting too heavy a spin on India’s rising curve of intolerance?
It’s quite likely, given the iconic stature of the Indian filmdom’s three Famous Khans — Aamir, Salman and Shahrukh — in Pakistan that Kher’s dig at Aamir raised the hackles of some of Aamir’s aficionados in Pakistani establishment and it was decided to pay him back by the raising of red flag when his name came up for a visa. Bureaucrats are basically ‘babus’ who can’t look at the bigger picture beyond their noses. It’s still too early to know exactly what went wrong, and where; what was the catalyst to unleash a political storm, literally, in KLF’s tea-cup on Anupam Kher’s visa and turn an arts forum into a political arena.
Yet more political spin was added to it when Nandita Das, an actress of great sensitive appeal to Pakistanis, also declined to participate at the 11th hour on the excuse of falling ill. Even if she was genuinely ill, she too was bracketed with Kher and accused of playing petty, tit-for-tat, politics. To his credit, Kher has quickly sued for peace. In a subsequent interview with DAWN, Pakistan’s flag-ship paper, he refuses to burn his bridges to Pakistan and says he will visit, if again invited and given a visa. It’s sad, to say the very least, that while politicians seem tilting at their windmills to choreograph a healthy new script for India-Pakistan relations and take much sting out of it, artistes and literati are unwittingly injecting politics into arts. Politics shouldn’t be the last refuge for talented artistes.
The author is a former Pakistan diplomat.
E-mail: k_k_ghori@hotmail.com