The Bangalore Literary Fest: A Story With at Least Two Sides

Former Director of the Bengaluru Literature Festival, Vikram Sampath. (Photo: Vikram Sampath’s Blog)

What is it about opinions, lately?

They’re one of two things everyone is supposed to have, and the stronger you hold on to one of those things, the more you seem to become of the other.

Now that I’ve got the unpleasantries out of the way, let’s get to the point. This October, Nayantara Sahgal, one of our more renowned writers, returned her Sahitya Akademi award as a gesture of protest against growing bigotry and partisan violence in the country, and what she sees as the government’s role in making them possible.

Noted writer and Jawaharlal Nehru’s niece Nayantara Sahgal at the Bangalore Literature Festival. (Photo: YouTube/BlrLitFest)

Personally, I side with the people who support ‘award wapsi’ as a form of peaceful, relevant protest. Poets may not quite be the unelected legislators of the world, but their reactions to historical currents can be an important source of insight and wisdom.

Not everyone agrees. Some feel there is no such climate of intolerance; some cite selective reportage as the real issue while others accuse the writers of hopping on Sahgal’s bandwagon. (I’d say they have a short attention span: remember Perumal Murugan, who was so appalled by the response to his novel One Part Woman that he announced his ‘death’ as a writer? He can be seen as an outlier to the increasing debate over tolerance in our literary circles.)

The Two Sides to the Story

The former Director of the Bengaluru Literature Festival, Vikram Sampath. (Photo Courtesy: facebook.com/vikram.sampath)

In short, opinions abound.

One of these opinions was expressed by Vikram Sampath, a writer who is also a founder of the Bangalore Literature Fest. He contended that the Akademi award was not a governmental honour, that returning it was an empty gesture. He held that a writer’s work, in contentious times, is to ‘write, write, write’.

I don’t agree with Sampath; the Akademi award is a form of benediction from officialdom, however indirectly. Rejecting it is a symbolic way to reject the status quo – even if the status quo has changed since you received your award. It’s a compelling way to make a statement. The more powerful and simple the symbolism, the more successful a statement is. Writers, after all, know all about symbolism and messages.

In response to Sampath’s piece, three writers in Bangalore announced they would boycott the Bangalore Literary Fest (BLF). At the time, it struck me that this was taking a symbol a bit too far. Sampath’s article nowhere condones the atrocities that have spurred this writers’ protest. I don’t know enough about Sampath to calibrate his political loyalties. What is clear, though, is that the BLF continued to welcome anyone who disagreed with him. Shashi Deshpande, who quit the Sahitya Akademi this October, is still associated with the BLF as a keynote speaker.

On the 28th, Sampath resigned from his post as one of the organisers of the fest. The most notable response to this has been a social media tirade by a paper tiger of the local literary circuit. It resorts to elegant tactics like calling Sampath a ‘PR muffin’ and throwing in a misogynist slur to boot. I’ve already given it more consideration than it deserves by saying this much.

Sampath’s resignation is a bad outcome for anyone who really cares about tolerance and free speech. Intellectuals and artists have the right, perhaps even the duty to rally dialogue and opinion around vital issues. But sometimes, when we draw battle lines, we risk painting ourselves into a corner. There are no odds in delivering a monologue to an echo chamber.

Every story has at least two sides – that’s something else writers should know all about.

(Jayaprakash Satyamurthy is a Bangalore-based writer and musician.)