A Celebration of Diversity

By Wendy Kristianasen, "A Celebration of Diversity for Harmony and Peace" - Middle East Online - London, UK
Monday, April 13, 2009

In this year’s Jaipur literary festival in India [January 21-25], a good number of Pakistani writers were able to take part. More surprising, and equally welcome, was the large number of Pakistanis in the audience too.

Can we make the arts an effective platform for fighting political (and religious and cultural) conflict in the Indian subcontinent, and further? The answer from Jaipur (India) this January was “Yes, we can.”

Salman Ahmed from the Pakistani Sufi rock group Junoon says: “The artist should be as ruthless in pursuing cultural harmony as the terrorist is bent on destroying it.”

Junoon played at this year’s Jaipur literary festival, now in its fourth year, which hosted 167 writers -- from the internationally famous to new young authors -- and 30 performing artists. Participants came from China, Australia, Malaysia, South Africa, Mali, Sierra Leone, Algeria, the US, the UK -- and, importantly, from Pakistan and Bangladesh. The festival’s purpose is dialogue between cultures and faiths, and across borders -- a celebration of diversity.

That purpose took on a directly political tone this year following the Mumbai attacks in late November and the tensions and debate they provoked on either side of the India/Pakistan border, not least among intellectuals.

Despite fears that visas might not be granted, a good number of Pakistani writers were able to take part. More surprising, and equally welcome, was the large number of Pakistanis in the audience too, taking an active role whenever the floor was opened up to general debate.

The dialogue between cultures was enhanced by the cross-culture of many of the writers, poised between the subcontinent and other parts of the world, mainly in the West. This cross-fertilisation was matched in the music, which was an integral part of the festival.

William Dalrymple, its co-director with Namita Gokhale, explained: “In the aftermath of the Bombay attacks, we worked on trying to showcase traditional forms of sacred music as a way of creating dialogue between faiths and cultures. After the horrors of Bombay with Muslim terrorists attacking both Hindus and Jews this dialogue seemed especially important to foster and encourage in India.”

So there were Muslim musicians from desert Rajasthan; Hindu Bauls from Bengal; musicians (Kudsi Erguner and Coleman Barks) celebrating the tolerant pluralistic Sufism of Rumi with verse and music of the ney; a Muslim griot from Mali on kora alongside Hindu dhrupad singers from Benares; a Jewish/Muslim concert for peace bringing together the Palestinian/New Yorker rap poet Suheir Hammad, the Indian based Israeli qawwali singer Shye Ben Tzur with his Indian Hindu and Muslim musicians, and the Pakistani Sufi rock group Junoon.

The music provided a backdrop to a diverse five-day programme in which politics was high on the agenda: Art historian Simon Schama spoke about American politics in the new Obama era as well as about art; Christophe Jaffrelot, the well-known specialist on India, discussed nationalism; a panel of experts compared Christian, Hindu and Muslim fundamentalisms; the commentator Shashi Tharoor discussed (and regretted) the impact of political and economic change on Indian society; a panel of writers talked of insurgencies (Nepal, the Naxalites) and how to portray them creatively; there was a heated open debate on Kashmir.

Alongside this was a kaleidoscope of other happenings: sessions on Sanskrit, local languages, oral traditions, the Mahabharata (the epic Hindu narrative), events for children, etc. Travelwriters, including Dalrymple, Colin Thubron and Paco Iyer, drew us to a wider world. Novelists, poets, biographers, authors of fact and fiction, talked of their passions and purposes.

The festival was free to all. Local schoolchildren sat on the grass and listened. The public debated, and crowded round to talk to the authors. People ate and drank tea and beer together, and stood in the same long queue to be served – no matter if it was Amitabh Bachchan, the film actor/producer/TV presenter (mobbed by admirers), or best-selling novelist Vikram Seth, or Vikas Swarup, author of Slumdog Millionaire.

As Junoon’s Salman Ahmed remarked: “Films, music and literature are what give South Asians an identity, joy and a much needed sense of normality. That’s why the fanatics abhor them so much. If we start pulling the plug on artists, the fanatics and the warmongers have already won.”

[Pictures (left to right) Salman Ahmad from Junoon; Coleman Barks and Muzaffar Ali. Photos: from the JLF website http://jaipurliteraturefestival.org/]