by Guest Blogger Sushma Joshi
Still thinking about freedom, I entered the Baithak tent, where S Anand was translating a story written by a Dalit writer. A Dalit family has returned from the city and is roundly beaten by the village headman who humiliates them and makes them pay money. At the end of the session, an older woman asks Valmiki, one of the writers: “Excuse me, do you base your stories on reality, or do you make them up?” Valmiki explodes, angry: “this is all reality, Madam! I cannot even drink the water in Rajasthan if I go out now!” The older woman, puzzled, asks: “So this is all real?”
Outside in the main lawn, we are now sitting to watch Southasians gather to talk about their tough neighbourhood. There are the usual suspects-Shyam Sharan, a high ranking Indian diplomat, Asma Jahangir, human rights lawyer from Pakistan, and three writers—Ali Sethi from Pakistan, Shazia Omar from Bangladesh, and Romesh Gunesekara from Sri Lanka. Predictably, there was no one from Nepal or Maldives or Bhutan, although once in a while some speaker would refer to Nepal (in absentia.) “We should have more people here but we couldn’t find them, next year we’ll try to get Nepalis to represent” line has been ongoing in South Asian gatherings for quite a while now— I smiled when I heard it in one session. There are a lot of well-educated and articulate Nepalis at the festival, but none of them were asked to talk. So there you go… but apparently Nepalis are not the only one feeling left out of the “neighbourhood”.
Asma Jahangir was quite forceful about her depictions of India as a neighbourhood bully. “India has not provided a responsible neighbourhood. While I like Indians on an individual level, and who tend to be very humble and neighbourly, on a national level they have a collective arrogance. Indians think: we are so big, we are so great, we are so important…”
Siddharth Varadarajan, the moderator: we do have to be careful of this kind of Indian triumphalism, he acknowledged.
Gunasekara said: “if you think of the neighbourhood as a plate of rice, the one in the middle can jump all they want, but the ones in the periphery can jump just a little and the plate gets upset and the rice scatters. The view of the “neighbourhood” depends upon where you are located.” A somewhat incoherent, but it gives you the picture.
Siddharth Varadarajan’s “what can India do to help Pakistan?” didn’t go down too well with Asma Jahangir, and she tried to call him on this condescending attitude a few times. “First stop saying you are going to help us—only we can bring democracy. The other is to stop saying India and Pakistan can only have a good relationship if a military government is there. This huge democracy speaks as if we didn’t have a heart, as if we didn’t matter, as if we didn’t have a movement behind us,” Ms. Jahangir said, getting quite upset.
“India is more than its material progress,” said Asma Jahangir, unconsciously echoing the theme from the morning. “It is made up of ideas and value systems. There used to be a period when it used to be really curious about its neighbours. Now it’s oblivious to the neighbourhood.”
From there on to “Blue, White, Red,” where writers Alan Mabanku of Congo, and Veronique Tadjo of Cote D’Ivoire, gripped the audience with their tales of oral traditions, origins of stories, and Rwanda. Both writers were Francophones writing in a postcolonial world. Alan and Veronique had both written about Rwanda. “It took the international community so long to describe it as a massacre,” Said Veronique. “It is the duty of the writer to describe this. Stay alert, be careful, it can happen again.”
They also discussed multilingualism, the many languages of Africa that were overlaid by the omnipresent French language. “Language is power,” said Mabanku. “People should be able to learn their own languages and to express their minds freely without being oppressed.”
In “Of Women, Rebels and Peasants,” Dilip Simeon read out a fascinating episode—in which a Naxalite hiding underground as a truck khalasi meets some French comrades– of his new book. Nandini Sundar, anthropologist, said: “Large parts of India is really a warzone, Dalits and Adivasis, very poor people telling the state: come on, counter me. Everybody wants to tell their own stories but the structures stop them all the time.”
As more and more states sell their essential public freedoms for private posperity and material comforts, and states become more violent in their attempts to control dissenting or minority concerns and voices, the one thing that must be guarded fiercely with one’s life, it appears, is the freedom to use one’s language, speak one’s mind, and tell one’s story. This is one essential freedom that can never be compromised, no matter how seductive the tradeoff might be.
Sushma Joshi blogs at www.sushma.blogspot.com and www.sushmasfiction.blogspot.com. For previous blogs from the Jaipur Literature Festival, go here.
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