Incredible awards

The Mumbai LitFest must be forever grateful to Girish Karnad for ramming it unceremonially into the international limelight. But for Karnad’s sudden attack on V.S. Naipaul, the world outside of Mumbai may not have noticed this particular festival of literature.

After all, literature is not really prime time news material. Why should it be? Literature works quietly over time — it catches you unawares, and softly, indiscernibly, shapes your thoughts, your views, your idea of the world and yourself. Literature works alone, it may stir deep passions, soothe the distraught, make you laugh, make you weep — surely such rudimentary stuff does not deserve the media spotlight? Newspapers must ration space, especially during the fantastic ad-blitz of the Diwali season. And prime time television news, as even the dumbest of us knows by now, is for important matters like who said what in politics, who wore what at parties, and who is seeing whom in the film world. So unless literature is dressed up as any of the above, it is difficult to get much attention in news media.
Which, happily, led to the birth of litfests in India. These serve up literature-related matters in a festive spirit, basically dressed up as glam parties. And the more celebrities you get, the more news coverage you are likely to draw. But celebrities don’t come alone. They come on the festive crutches of sponsors. And so you have a situation where V.S. Naipaul, Nobel laureate in literature, is awarded — in his absence — the Landmark Literature Live! Lifetime Achievement Award.
And we still would not have paid it much attention if distinguished writer, actor, director and scholar Girish Karnad had not, out of the blue, lambasted Naipaul’s idea of India and Indian Islam at the festival where he was supposed to be talking on his experiences in theatre. So everyone got to know, indisputably and unmistakably, that not only was there this litfest, it was also giving out a curiously named Lifetime Achievement Award to a foreign Nobel Laureate.
Not that there is anything wrong in having a curiously named award. I remember wondering if the Booker Prize had suddenly become gender-sensitive when it became the Man Booker Prize. But Karnad was not concerned about the name of the award. His objection was to the person the award was honouring. With his trademark lucidity, confidence and clarity, Karnad asked why Sir Vidia, who was not an Indian and who hated Muslims, was being given the prize. And pointed out how Naipaul’s books and actions (like aligning with the BJP after the demolition of the Babri Masjid) expressed his hatred for Indian Islam.
The controversy it triggered has mostly focused on whether Karnad was right to say what he did at the litfest. As festival director Anil Dharkar pointed out, Girish Karnad had been invited to the festival to speak on his journey in theatre, he was not supposed to speak on Naipaul. And even those who support what Karnad said concede that perhaps he should not have used that litfest platform to launch his attack. The unkind suggest that he used Naipaul to get some attention and the litfest to get a voice. What a sad age we live in, where people can believe that a cultural icon like Karnad — eminent intellectual honoured by coveted awards for literature and films, including the Padma Bhushan, Jnanpith and Golden Lotus — needs to be provided a platform and a voice by a still new litfest and an absentee foreign author.
Of course the literary brilliance of Naipaul is not in doubt. So the Mumbai LitFest was within its rights to honour him with the award for literature. The question is, in their search for an acceptable winner, where exactly were they looking? How come they had to go wandering in foreign lands to find a British writer from Trinidad of Indian ancestry for this Mumbai prize? How come they did not find anyone in this land of 1.1 billion people and 24 languages with vibrant literatures? Could there be a certain laziness in the process of selection here? Did they just go for a celebrity who would draw moneybag sponsors, a foreigner of Indian descent who had got the Nobel Prize for literature and so must be pretty good at writing, eh?
Mumbai LitFest authorities have quickly pointed out that Naipaul is of Indian origin (a nostalgic claim we have made stridently since his Nobel), and so completely legit as a recipient of the award. They have also denied that he is anti-Muslim. Meanwhile, Karnad has been attacked as an irritating “professional secularist”.
But all is well because everyone is within their rights. Naipaul has a right to be what he is. The litfest has a right to be a lazy celebrity-chaser. Karnad has a right to object.
Sadly, we seem to ignore the larger question that Karnad’s objection raises: how meaningful are awards today? Are we devaluing awards by our unthinking, slapdash attitude? Or by political considerations?
We may be living in an age where awards have no meaning. Where honours are conferred for reasons other than excellence. Where there are so many awards that nobody recognises them anymore.
Even the biggest prize of all, the Nobel Prize, has been systematically devalued. How else could the European Union win this year’s Nobel Peace Prize? But it does not shock us. Not after Barack Obama got the Nobel simply for becoming President of the United States.
In literature, the Booker seemed to be teetering on the edge of credibility last year, when it focused on populist writing rather than on good literature. The jury, packed with people not involved with literature, had sought “readability” and books that “zip along” rather than that elusive thing called literary quality. The award has somewhat regained its balance this year, but one never knows what the future holds.
Back home, we have the national literary body, the Sahitya Akademi, which honours every year writers from each of the 24 Indian languages that it recognises. This gives you hordes of Sahitya Akademi Awardees from all over India and of varying literary excellence. Big languages with a strong literary tradition, like Malayalam or Bengali for example, are treated at par with small or emerging literary languages with very few good authors, like, say, Dogri or Maithili. So every year you have a batch of the much-feted Sahitya Akademi Awardees — ranging from excellent to embarrassingly mediocre.
And if established awards can cast credibility aside, why can’t new ones? Instead of cribbing about Naipaul’s views or Karnad’s etiquette we should be delighted that we have a healthy culture of open discussion. Maybe that will stop us from slip-sliding into a weird world of meaningless honours and curious gestures.

The writer is editor of The Little Magazine.