The organisers of the Jaipur literature Festival have learnt their lessons from the Salman Rushdie case. Sanjoy Roy, producer of JlF, says this time they aim to provide a platform allowing plurality of ideas and balanced points of view. He also tells Divya Kaushik about the expansion of brand JlF over the years
Controversies mostly leave a bitter after-taste but that’s really not the case here. The organisers of Jaipur literature Festival (JlF) have learnt their lessons from the Salman Rushdie case in 2012. The author’s appearance in the literature festival was cancelled after protests from local Islamic groups and threats from some activists. Acting without the sanction of organisers, four authors at the event read portions of the Satanic Verses in support of Rushdie and that resulted in an uproar from the fringe elements.
Sanjoy Roy, managing director of Teamwork Arts and producer of JlF, says that the controversy helped them emerge stronger and now they are better equipped to deal with such situations. “The biggest lesson that we learnt from the Salman Rushdie case is that we should create a platform that gives an equal right to every body to present their point of view. When I interacted with people, I realised that while a few of them continue to threaten us, there was a majority of people who were willing to understand what we were trying to say. It is extremely important to be fair and give a platform to everyone. So after that controversy, each year we have challenged ourselves to give everyone that freedom of expression. We maintain that any discussion or debate that is a part of JlF is not limited to any specific point of view.
The only way we can progress as a society is by allowing everyone freedom to expression,” says Sanjoy. He gives an example of recent controversy around Tamil writer Perumal Murugan’s book, whose story revolves around the problems faced by a childless peasant couple and the woman’s attempt to get pregnant following a tradition of consensual sex with a stranger, to stress on the need to advocate freedom of expression. “We have stood for freedom of expression and we will continue to do that. There have been recent cases, which are sad, where we see a literary work suffering, we have to talk about these issues,” he adds.
As the festival is all set to kickstart from January 21, Sanjoy is being asked time and again about how well prepared are they to handle controversies. “With each year we have been better equipped but what is surprising is that despite so many good things happening at the festival, media focusses more on the controversies. In the recent years, we have become less tolerant as a society. Fringe elements and extremists have always existed in every decade and in every society, but what is disturbing now is that they tend to hijack the agenda of democracy of the nation. They tend to make their agenda as the end all and be all and dictate terms. This is a very disturbing trend. But we maintain that the festival continues to be a platform allowing plurality of ideas, where people from across the world can come and share their views openly,” says Sanjoy.
JlF has grown leaps and bounds in its popularity across the world in the last few years. Not only that, it has also emerged as a successful business model, as a cultural event that hosts the best from the literary world and invites everyone to be a part of it. “It is not an easy business model to sustain. From over 5,000 visitors we have expanded to accommodate over 2,70,000 visitors and to maintain such a huge festival as a free one requires a lot of planning. Each person entering the festival means cost to us.
Though the number of sponsors has increased but it is not easy to find sponsors for such an event that takes place at a huge scale. Our challenge is to keep reinventing every year and offer better experience to visitors. We have been expanding our arms to embrace visitors from every part of the world. The reason why we have seen the festival growing manifold in last few years is because people who have attended it have been the ambassadors for it. The word of mouth has been the medium of our worldwide promotion. Also JlF has emerged as an event of the city, Jaipur takes pride in this festival and some people talk about it even if they have not attended it,” says Sanjoy.
After successfully establishing the brand here, Jaipur literature Festival (JlF) is heading to Boulder in Colorado in September this year. “Publishing scene in the US is different from rest of the world, especially Commonwealth countries. This is an avenue and a platform to discover a different facet of literature. We plan to have authors from India, Pakistan, China, Japan with special focus on latin American writing. We are looking at how different philosophies at different locations can resonate with each other,” ends Sanjoy.