The standoff at the Jaipur Literature Festival mirrors the crisis of Indian writing, says Mihir S Sharma. Both are unworldly and fragile.

Once, walking into Jaipur’s Diggi Palace during the Literature Festival was to enter a charmed circle. Outside, a city buzzed along, caring little for the talent that had gathered to speak on brightly-decorated stages, pausing only to stuff itself with free food and drink while complaining about publishers. If you wrote, you went with a dog-eared notebook hoping that the men and women you admired vouchsafed a word or two of advice. If you read, you went to set the you loved in the best possible context, the words and opinions of the writers that produced them. Frequently, the personality of a writer — J M Coetzee’s terseness, Alexander McCall Smith’s tea-and-crumpets fussiness — meant you went back to what they wrote and discovered additional layers of personality.

Either way, just by walking in, as anyone could do, you felt a distinct sense of privilege. What finer tribute to an open society, to have an event that is free and open to all, and yet confers a sense of specialness on those that turn up?

That would not, could not, last. The pleasant notion that JLF was an open, engaged space, yet one where the contestations that define our society were politely put away, has been harshly revealed as, well, fiction. Salman Rushdie could have come; but nobody can blame him for not taking the risk. The writers who read from his Satanic Verses could have stayed and courted arrest, but nobody should blame them for taking legal advice and leaving. The organisers could have gone ahead with a video-link to Rushdie, and taken the risk of violent protests and a lathi-charge, but only the determinedly crabby will blame them for ducking out of it. After all, who wants to see the angry fissures of the world outside spread into the happy lawns of Diggi?

The sad truth is that the Jaipur Literature Festival is, like Indian writing, a bubble. Most about and from India are written from a mental place very like JLF, a bubble of security and civility — yet from which we, as writers and readers, think that we can address our society’s convulsions and barbarities. The stand-off we saw at JLF is the same as the crisis of Indian writing. Both are unworldly, fragile bubbles. Both claim otherwise.

I have no recommendations to make to JLF on how to reconcile this existential contradiction. Nor should anyone imagine that the comfortably-off, personally secure chroniclers of an India in transition — whether through fiction or non-fiction — should all start writing Austenesque comedies of manners set in Altamount Road or Jor Bagh. (Though somebody should, really.) Yet it is clear that those associated with JLF, whether as observers, attenders or organisers, need to think a little about how it places itself. And, equally, those of us engaged with Indian writing, whether as readers or writers, need to be more mindful of the bubble from which we are writing.

Too many “socially conscious” novels, essays and narratives parachute in, claiming to be engaged and yet are quite obviously from a position of privilege. How, then, to break this bubble from which writing occurs, before it is broken for us?

I turn to that dog-eared JLF notebook for help. And I discover much discussion of the recent and welcome explosion of small-picture writing about India. Sonia Faleiro’s Beautiful Thing, about bar girls in Mumbai; Aman Sethi’s A Free Man, about migrant workers in Delhi; and Samanth Subramaniam’s Following Fish, about coastal communities, are three well-received examples. None of them makes grand statements about India’s transformation. None of them display the Sainath-style combination of platitudes and unsupported assertion that has so compromised socially engaged writing in India.

Unsurprisingly, the star of the festival was Katherine Boo, a New Yorker staff writer who has just written a book — Behind the Beautiful Forevers — about a slum near Mumbai’s airport; a slim book about the lives of people who live there based on four years of legwork, thousands of interviews, and hundreds of RTI requests. It wears its deep research lightly, as an aura of confidence rather than as an armour of tiresome detail. And the book is about what the book is about: the people of Annawadi; not, as such writing in and about India has historically been, about the horror, pity or empathy those of us within the bubble should feel about those condemned to life outside it. “First-person accounts about getting the story,” Boo said on stage, “gets to self-mythologising.” Boo spent four years, but there is no “I” in her book.

Philip Gourevitch, who wrote the defining book on the Rwanda genocide — the moving, and colossally depressing We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed With our Families, disagreed. “There is an ‘I’ in the Rwanda book,” he argued, “but there is no me. You learn nothing about me.” Why? Because he needed to show how he chose the people he chose; he needed to specify that his sample was not random. Boo solved this problem differently, by writing an author’s afterword, grounded in data, about whether or not her experience of Annawadi was exceptional.

The question these writers were foregrounding is essential, and lessons about it are being slowly learned. Write about India, and you write inevitably from outside the story. When you become the story, as JLF did, you realise how hollow your claims of belonging and openness are. From this crisis, hopefully, will emerge a truer and more honest literature.

And like next year’s JLF, it must be one without artifice. The most cogent advice for writing from the bubble came, perhaps, from the playwright David Hare, in a completely different context. He spoke of how he failed as an actor: because he felt none of the emotions that he had written for the part. It is “the essential moral problem with acting,” he said: “Lying”. If you force yourself, and middle-class empathy, pity or values, into the story you’re telling, you will eventually fail. The bursting of JLF’s bubble should tell us that.