The curtain came down on the Jaipur Literature Festival 2011 on Tuesday with a debate on society’s right to unrestrained freedom of expression that saw celebrated activist Aruna Roy, authors Abha Dawesar and Jaishree Misra, poet Ashok Vajpayee, Tehelka editor Tarun Tejpal and political commentator Swapan Dasgupta touch upon the “oppressive face” of the state, the crusade behind the Right to Information Act, the games power plays and the thin line between privacy and secrecy.
Vikram Seth, who talked about his various forms of expression, including poetry, prose and sculpture, was among the big draws at the concluding day. For A Suitable Boy, Seth said he was influenced by Cao Xueqin’s classical Chinese novel, The Story of the Stone, also known by the title Dream of the Red Chamber. “When I read it, I found my novel’s plot expanding. The Story of the Stone kept its intimacy as it went through a period of history,” said the author, adding that the only Indian writer he read while he was working on his enormous novel set in the country post-independence was R.K. Narayan. “But it was not interfering in my world of the North,” he said. Seth, who maintains a veil of secrecy over his 2013 sequel to the novel, titled A Suitable Girl, said he was not enthused about doing it initially, but later got fascinated by it when he realised that he could set the sequel in the present times. It would enable him to “wander about in the real world” and he would not have to research in the library. Rupa Mehra’s younger daughter Lata, for whom “a suitable boy” was sought in the eponymous prequel, will be about 80, looking “a suitable girl” for her grandson. Seth, however, was reluctant to reveal much, saying: “I’m not quite sure about the plot yet. Don’t tell this to my publisher, but I’ve not even begun writing it yet. I wish I knew how it would shape up. But I’m glad I don’t know.” Seth also read out his famous poem All You Who Sleep Tonight. He obliged the school children, who said they loved the poem as “they had to study it”, with a reading of The Frog and the Nightingale.
In yet another scintillating session of the day, moderated by Nilanjana Roy, Martin Amis and John Barrett McInerney travelled back in time, talking about British and American fiction in the 1980s and the entrails of sex and drugs in their writings. Amis, the author of novels, like Money and Information, said: “Writing a novel is a gamble on the universality of your experiences,” adding that a writer was a solitary being.
McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City and The Good Life, said that when he wrote Bright Lights, his debut novel, in 1983, there was a “rich New York literature” to draw from, like J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. “New York seemed to be a big subject to novelists for some reason,” he said.