Slugfest live!

We were being modest in our projection for publicity when the committee sat around the table, months before ‘Literature Live!’ took off. None of us envisaged the fame that would surround the festival weeks after it had ended. If we were to apportion credit for this windfall, 40 per cent would go to careful planning on the part of the committee, and 60 per cent to Girish Karnad, whose attack on V.S. Naipaul ensured that news of the festival was beamed into millions of homes in the country and abroad. No one had seen it coming — but then, if it had, would our reactions be any different?

Among the sessions that Tata Literature Live! provided this year, a new one was added — ‘Master Class’, in which ‘masters or authorities in their profession were invited to speak about their craft.’ American neuroscientist and professor of human psychiatry James Fallon was invited to give a talk on ‘The minds of psychopaths’. Similarly, Girish Karnad was to talk about his life in theatre. People had trooped in to listen to Karnad speak about the making of Tughlaq , Yayati , Hayavadana … and his marvellous journey as a playwright.

Instead, to the dismay of some, delight of others, and surprise of all, he launched into an attack of Sir Vidia Naipaul, who, as Farrukh Dhondy put it, “had, like Elvis, long left the building”.

True. This was not the platform to speak about Naipaul. Karnad was invited to speak about his own body of work. True also that freedom of speech cannot be denied, which is why perhaps the Festival Director let him have his say. What irked people was his refusal to let either Anil Dharker or Dhondy (the latter was armed with facts and figures, not just hear-say) speak - to refute or debate the issue. Still, as Shobhaa De says, “What’s a literature festival without a good slugfest?” We’ll let Festival Director Dharker have the last word on this issue: “This is not what we invited him to speak about. His tirade was intemperate,” he said, adding, in a lighter vein, “but we’re now going to invite him every year and cut down on our publicity budget.”

For those who came in late, Literature Live! The Mumbai LitFest, founded and spearheaded by writer and columnist Anil Dharker, was a larger and longer festival this year. Since its launch three years ago (it began as a three-day programme), it has expanded to five days, with simultaneous events being held in different auditoriums of the National Centre for the Performing Arts — a place that has now become home to Literature Live! The opening night was a swing between the spiritual and the temporal. Whose words would the audience lap up? Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, whose followers (an entire block of the Tata Theatre was reserved for them) hung on to every word in his evening session, ‘Reinventing Spirituality’? Or Nobel laureate Naipaul, who was to receive the Landmark Literature Live! Lifetime Award? Sadhguru’s irreverence for reverence had the audience crying with laughter. “Guru,” he began, “is a four-letter word, which is followed by a three-letter word.”

Why do people need gurus?” asked Dharker, who shared the stage with Sadhguru and poet Arundhati Subramaniam. “When you walk in the dark and someone shines a torch and lights up your path, is that such a bad thing?” Sadhguru countered. By the end of his session, people were applauding Sadhguru’s wit and wisdom, even as Naipaul was ushered in to receive the award.

People waited for his outspoken views, but no one expected what was to follow: a visibly emotional Naipaul, who had tears rolling down his cheeks when he talked about his book A House for Mr Biswas , or his cat Augustus, whom he loved to the bitter end and had to put down.

The next few days were a whirl of activity of writers and thinkers, poets and performers, book launches and book signings, fans meeting their favourite authors, and writers feeding off the high that the festival provided. Shobhaa De launched her book Sethji , wearing a Gandhi topi that read ‘I am not Sethji’.

Boria Majumdar, widely known for cricket writing, revealed another facet of his personality when he launched Cooking on the Run , which, as the title explains, is about food. If food is there, can sex be far behind? Three panellists — author Kiran Nagarkar, the irrepressible Farrukh Dhondy, and very erudite Faramerz Dabhoiwala (a professor at Oxford whose ‘seminal’ work, The Origins of Sex , has been making waves the size of a tsunami) — marched onto the stage. The three of them were to discuss ‘Erotic writing’, but spent at least 15 minutes trying to mask their discomfort discussing the subject, much to the delight of the audience, until Dhondy took the bull by the horns. Dabhoiwala held forth brilliantly in his master class on The Origins of Sex to a full house, followed by a discussion on ‘Sex and violence’ with James Fallon, who had just given a talk on ‘The minds of psychopaths’.

Gravitas and levity both played out equal hands at the festival. Moni Mohsin delighted the audience with a reading from her hugely successful book, Diary of a Social Butterfly . Jeet Thayil read a particularly interesting passage from his Narcopolis .

Roddy Matthews wore lightly the mantle of his revolutionary ideas, documented in his book Jinnah Versus Gandhi , to a packed auditorium, while Scott Carney, the investigative journalist, made sure we never look at steak and kidney pie in the same way again, with his straight talk on organ trafficking. The feisty Miriam Batliwala took a long, light view on her blindness with her book Insight .

And of course, Girish Karnad ensured that the buzz at Literature Live! continues long after the festival has ended.