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Karachi - January 31, 2011.
I am back home in Karachi and finally able to write of the Jaipur's LitFest's last sessions which a strong input from the rather exciting Pakistani contingent. This included a lively session "Pulp Fiction" with Faiza S. Khan and Pritham Chakravaty. Faiza spoke of her discovery of the Urdu detective novel Chalawa by Hussain Iqbal featuring a dashing and rich female sleuth Sabiha Bano. She read a lively extract which had been translated by Mohammed Hanif for The Life's Too Short Literary Review of which Khan is the editor-in-chief. Pritham Chakravaty read extracts from the anthologies she has compiled of Tamil fiction translated by her.
The session was chaired by the well-known Indian novelist Namita Gokhale who is the co-director of the Jaipur Literature Festival. Gokhale was among the panelists, together with Kamila Shamsie, Anjum Hasan and Jaishree Mishra in a session called "Popcorn Essays: What Movies Do To Writers". The title is that of an anthology edited by Jai Arjun Singh who chaired the session – and all four panelists were contributors.
Gokhale read out a vivid account of her years with a 'gossip driven' film magazine Super; Kamila read out essay on the period between her novels Broken Verses and Burnt Shadows, during which, in an attempt to move away from her previous Karachi-based work and the written word, she immersed herself in films which made her think further about the difference between films and books. Kamila was also a participant in another panel "Imaginary Homelands" with Ian Jack, Junot Diaz, the Nepalese novelist Manjushree Thapa (Tutor of History) and the British novelist of Ukranian origin Marina Lewycka (A Short History of Tractors), all of whom discussed concepts of home and belonging in this mobile age – though Jack pointed out that his only migration was from Scotland to England.
As time wore on, it became increasingly difficult for me to choose between sessions and so I took to "session-hopping". This was not really the most brilliant of solutions – I missed Richard Ford's apology for the inadequacies of the earlier discussion on American women writers in a panel that he was to discuss American fiction, but I was there in time to hear him read from his work. Every nuance reminded me of why, I have been so spellbound by his short stories – and in Jaipur, I picked up a novel of his.
There was a packed audience for the British historian Alex von Tunzelmann who was interviewed by Karan Thapar on her critically acclaimed book Indian Summer: The Secret History of End of Empire which tells the story of Partition, as well as that of Edwina and Nehru.
In recent years I have become increasingly interested in the creative memoir and literary non-fiction and found the dicussion "The New Non-Fiction" between Ahdaf Soueif, Basharat Peer, David Finkel, Martin Amis and Waheed Mirza to be full of insights. Many of them spoke of how the techniques of the fiction they had read influenced their writing. Pulitzer winner David Finkel, author of the Good Soldiers described how, as an "embedded" reporter in Iraq, he wanted to report, not daily events of the war, but what war did to the men who fought in it. While Waheed Mirza remarked that although his novel on Kashmir, drew on daily realities, he found fiction a better medium to express and imagine experiences which would have been restricted, had he limited himself to facts. Later on, I went to Will Fiennes talk about his creative memoir The Music Room and was spellbound by the extract he read about his relationship with his epileptic and handicapped brother.
There absolutely no place for me to sit for Mohsin Hamid's lively and witty session in conversation with journalist Chandrahas Choudhury, because it was crowded and during which, the Harvard educated Pakistani scholar Aliya Iqbal Naqvi read out an extract from the Hindi translation of The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Later, in answer to a question, Mohsin spoke about the complexities of making the text of The Reluctant Fundamentalist so ambiguous: once it was written, it was not just Chengiz's story, but 'yours' i.e., each individual reader and it becomes a playground for what goes on in the reader's head.
Ahmed Rashid was as erudite as always - in conversation with the well-informed William Dalrymple. Ahmed spoke of the many years that he has covered the Afghan conflict, from the time Soviet troops rolled into Afghanistan. He went on to speak of the changing face of the regions, the difference between the mujahadin and the Taliban and the grave danger that Pakistan faces today as radicalisation spreads.
It was quite a treat to hear Vikram Seth talk about his work and his plans for a new novel A Suitable Girl, which takes the story of Lata his protagonist in A Suitable Boy, forward to the present day and examines her relationship with her children and grandchildren. But I also managed to catch the Pakistani writers Zaheda Hina, Shahyrar Fazli and the Bengladeshi novelist Shaheed Akhter discussed their novels about war and violence in the sub-continent – Zaheda Hina's on 1957, Fazli and Akhter's on 1971. This session was moderated by Urvashi Butalia, who is among the advisors of the festival.
The next day – on India's Republic Day – I discovered that both Urvashi Butalia of Zubaan and my publisher, Ritu Menon of Women Unlimited, who had co-founded Kali, the first feminist publisher in India, had both been awarded the Padma Shri Award for their contribution to literature and education.
So its seems that congratulations are in order all round – to Urvashi and Ritu for their achievements, to William Dalrymple, Namita Gokhale and their team which includes the immensely helpful Sanjoy Roy, Sheuli Sethi and Kritika Gupta, for a very successful festival.
I had a wonderful time.
Muneeza Shamsie, in Karachi
