Where are the critics?

“Dawn breaks behind the eyes
He swore his love
The lies — the lies...”
From The Epitaphs
of Bachchoo

The Jaipur Literature Festival began on Friday and seems set to be the literary event of the year with two Nobel prize-winners and several distinguished and popular writers in attendance. Some of them may even be distinguished and popular at the same time, though I would, for example, separate George Steiner and Dan Brown into the two distinct non-intersecting categories.
In India these categories don’t seem very distinct. Popularity, volume of sales, notoriety, controversy and, of course, foreign prizes are the hallmarks of recognition and recommendation.
So it is sort of surprising that V.S. Naipaul has never been invited. I say “sort of” because I know things that may be well-known to the literary world but aren’t perhaps common knowledge. I know that Naipaul has been reviewed on at least two occasions — how shall I put it — “ungenerously” by William Dalrymple, one of the organisers. Then another organiser of the festival is the mother-in-law of Patrick French whose authorised biography of Naipaul was disowned and denounced by Sir Vidia and by Lady Naipaul as inaccurate and malicious. These are, of course, not secret matters. William’s reviews were published in India and Britain and the displeasure with which the authorised biography was greeted by the Naipauls is also in the public domain. Perhaps my speculation is wrong and Naipaul has been invited to one or other Jaipur festivals and has for a reason unconnected with these facts declined to come. I don’t know and will perhaps now be told.
Less perplexing to some may be the fact that I have never been invited to the Jaipur Literature Festival. The organisers can’t be expected to know that I have a few prizes to my name — there was something called The Other Award which is handed out for the best book of children’s literature each year and then there was the nomination for the Whitbread in which I am afraid I came second and, if prestige is the criterion then there was the Samuel Beckett Award for the best television play in the mid-eighties. But I am not foolish enough to imagine that these are in any way as prestigious as the Starbucks Award or the Tate and Lyle Prize etc.
The Swedish award is, of course, the crowning glory. Some years ago when I worked as a television bureaucrat I returned to my office from some external creative task and was told by Eva, my secretary, that a professor from the Swedish Academy in Stockholm had been trying to get me all day and that he would call back soon. I settled into my office and very soon Eva put a call through to my phone saying it was the Swedish Academy again. I picked up the phone and said, “Say no more, professor. I accept!”
After a very slight pause the professor said “Ah, not yet, Mr Dhondy, not yet. I am ringing to ask if you will attend a literary festival in Stockholm in July”.
It was the nearest I got.
I suppose the importance of the Jaipur Literature Festival and its imminence has prompted comments in the press about its scope and intentions. The most amusing of these was a recent exchange I read between William Dalrymple and Hartosh Singh Bal in a weekly magazine. The debate opened with Bal accusing the festival and Dalrymple, one of its organisers and alleged founders, of looking to Britain for all estimations of literary worth. The article carried a full-page cartoon caricature of a blue-eyed, double-chinned Dalrymple dressed in princely Mughal attire with an orange kurta and maroon speckled waist coat, three strings of pearls and an orange turban crown complete with pearled plumes and adornments.
Dalrymple’s reply in the next issue of the weekly, accused the cartoon and the article of being “racist”. No doubt he didn’t like being caricatured. It is something that politicians have to get used to by virtue of their public role. Writers can be indulged if they retain the right to be offended. “Racist” is a handy term and stimulates immediate revulsion. Dalrymple attempts to stimulate this same revulsion when he says at the end of the article that Bal’s (I know Dalrymple, I don’t know Bal) contentions felt “like the literary equivalent of shit through an immigrant’s letter-box”.
Reading Bal’s piece didn’t leave me with this impression. Neither is Dalrymple being parodied in the cartoon for being of the Caucasian-Celtic races. The cartoon seems to be a comment on his well-known penchant for things Mughal, including the elaborate attire.
Dalrymple rightly contends that the festival has a broad reach and this year includes the South African J.M. Coetzee and the Turkish Orhan Pamuk.
Bal replies to Dalrymple’s reply saying that Indians and in particular the Jaipur organisers “needed the English newspapers and critics to elaborate their greatness before we came to accept it. They have been filtered to us through Britain... if Pamuk had come to India before such endorsement came his way we would not have noticed him”.
That’s true. So is the fact that Bal points to earlier in his rebuttal that the people who remain the focus of the Festival, however many Indians attend and are empanelled, are not homegrown.
What both sides in this dispute fail to come to terms with is the fact that these truths are not consequences of any bias or Raj-centric attitude on Dalrymple’s part or on anyone else’s part. They are the consequence of there being a gaping, hopeless, perhaps irreparable absence of any critical literature or tradition that is homegrown. Yes, there are reviews and puffs for books galore, but there has never been a fundamental questioning of what writing in India should be doing, what it should reveal and why. There has never been any examination of why one book is better than another or if indeed Indian writing is providing anything more than the imitated conceits and concerns of other cultures with the names, clothes and details made native.
Until a rich and even ruthless critical tradition can make sense of the country’s literary output we cannot blame Dalrymple and Jaipur for borrowing the critical yardstick. Will Bal step up to the mark?