Touchstones: Reading between the lines

As I sit down to write this, the noise of the Maharashtra municipal elections is all around me. By the time you read this column, we will all know who now controls the rich and income-generating public lands and amenities of this important state. The verdict seems to be almost unanimous that Maharashtra, most importantly Mumbai, is now a completely different political landscape from the usual Shiv Sena-BJP duopoly of yesteryears. So much has changed and is evolving but sadly our old political parties are still stuck in a time warp and incapable of responding to these momentous changes. I recall VS Naipaul’s ‘India: A Million Mutinies Now’, written decades ago, where he had a prescient interview with old Balasaheb Thackeray, the undisputed ruler of Bombay (as it was then). Do please read it if you can and you will get an idea of what these bubbling mutinies, so sharply noted by Naipaul all those years ago, have wrought to change the face of Naya Bharat.

Unfortunately, our political parties, weakened by dynastic power lines, are unable to see what Bihar has recently shown and what Maharashtra may reveal. UP and the Samajwadi Party will learn something too when the next election there is held. The Congress, of course, the mother (and grandmother) of all dynastic parties, has still not come to terms with the fact that this new India is no longer to be treated like a feudal territory. Ah well, who am I to speak when so many in their own parties are unable to say so openly?

From there, let us move to what else is a big highlight in January: the world-famous Jaipur Literature Festival, or the JLF as it is now billed in the hip-hop language of the young. Almost every writer, famous or new, wants to attend it and publishers from India and abroad, literary agents and regional writers flock there to hear, speak (or at least die trying) to the largest collection of readers and booklovers anywhere in the world. It was free when it was launched from the cosy precincts of Diggi Palace, situated at the end of a narrow winding lane. It was a venue that gave one the feeling of being among like-minded friends and warmly hosted by the family that ran it. Then came the hordes of the ‘let’s see’ crowds, young students who came to gawp at the filmstars and poets and writers they wanted to see rather than hear and the festival had to be shifted to a five-star hotel that was better equipped to handle unwelcome gate-crashers.

However, something changed when that happened and a completely new kind of ‘booklover’ entered the scene. Among them were young aspirational writers (no matter whether they were published or not), those bag ladies (as I used to call them) who came to shop in Jaipur’s famous markets and some who came to chatter amongst themselves as they swanned from one session to another. Some new forms of literary activists also took birth. Literary agents, marketing and PR firms, hustlers and movers who offered to introduce you to important people — you can get the drift of where that would take this serious gathering of yore.

Publishing houses, too, were quick to sense that book sales were plummeting alarmingly and unless they tackled this looming problem, many would have to shut shop (some had to). Regional writing, which was hitherto an invisible phenomenon, suddenly became important as translations made headlines at important international prizes and won huge dollar prizes. It seems to me as if writing became an alluring vocation (if that is the word) and every person was dying to write and be published. So while on the one hand, the old bookshops and publishing houses are struggling to survive, there is an avalanche of writers who are willing to do whatever it takes to publish or be damned. They offer to buy back the entire first print-run, pay some PR agency to place excerpts in digital newspapers and websites, find a ghost writer or a freelance editor to write and edit their work. And then, there is ChatGPT, AI and god knows what else to do the blood and sweat work. I myself have been offered tempting amounts from famous industrial houses to write an ‘autobiography’ or memoir of the founding worthy, who can hardly speak two sentences in a coherent language.

There is more. The trick is to be in the limelight by picking on an area that has not yet been mined to death. It started with religious divides, gender, sexual exploitation, caste, class and emotional violence and now as the floodgates are open for hearing what few would be comfortable reading in the raw, it is just plain rubbish. Health, self-care, skill development, beauty and food — these sell by the kilo, believe me. At the local book fair (currently on in Delhi), people probably spend more on the chaat, samosas and cutting chai than cutting writing.

Before I sound like a crochety old woman (I am one, unfortunately, having just turned 75), I am actually fearful of what we are offering to our young readers. Just as our cinema was destroyed by crass commercial concerns and our music polluted when the lines between classic and popular became blurred, there is a danger here of creativity being gobbled by formulas that sell. Watch out!

— The writer is a social commentator