Our litfests

With the arrival of spring comes also the season of our literary festivals. The Karachi Literary Festival has begun with its usual star-studded cast of writers, scholars, academicians and other prominent members of the civil society. The event’s inauguration in 2010 paved the way for similar festivals to be organised since 2013 in Lahore and Islamabad. The event in the two northern cities are planned over the coming few weeks. Such festivals should be important to us in many ways. They are a reminder that we still have a life that extends beyond the violence that has torn us apart and may offer a sense of humanity and a space in which to argue and think. It is also true that the world of words could help us push back the intolerance and narrow-mindedness that have created a crisis within our nation. In this sense the festivals have done well to revive a culture of dialogue that had been lost in the era of terrorism.

But more than half a decade since the first festival, it is time to begin to ask some questions. What is talked about? Who is included? Who is excluded? How relevant are the conversations? Have they helped revive literature in Pakistan?  Urdu literature here seems to be in a steady decline with no poets or writers having made themselves into national icons in the last three decades. Such a context means that organisers of these literature festivals have focused on literature produced in English, which is also the ‘first language’ of these events.  Here, the writers are few, the audience is limited and the subject-matter even more so. The result is that the festivals remain elitist spaces – open to all, but accessible to a few. What good is it to say that the festival is free for all when less than ten percent of the panels are in Urdu – let alone regional languages?  The minutes of silence observed for the literary giant Intizar Husain as the KLF opened should also be a reminder that Intizar Husain represented a crossover between the elite and the ordinary. While Urdu manages to get a place, notably in Karachi, the so-called ‘regional’ languages which belong to the ‘masses’ do not get anything beyond a token reference. The choice of location too is prohibitive to say the least. The result is that the festivals become gatherings of the who’s who with the media treating the events like a mini-fashion parade. The topics mostly revolve around ‘identity’ issues – feminism, minorities, ethnicity etc with the speakers’ radicalism touching its height as they discuss the Baloch issue (which remains a rarity). Yet, it still seems the voice of the people is missing. The elephant in the room – the issue of class either as something to be seen on its own or as something underlying most of the problems mentioned above – is rarely, if ever, discussed. Nor is cross-class participation encouraged in a meaningful way. The struggles of workers and peasants in this country and elsewhere against the neo-liberal onslaught on their rights in the last two decades fail to inspire our thinkers and writers.     

It is important to look at literary festivals in the context of the broader process of alienation between politics and literature. In the 1950s Manto was produced by the orgy of violence enacted during Partition. In the 1960s and 1970s Jalib’s poetry was delivered to rallies of workers and peasants resisting dictatorship and imagining a new world. Till the late 1980s Faiz  and Sibte-Hassan wrote of and against class exploitation. In the same era, street theatre became the medium to resist dictatorship in darker times for politics. In the time of the literary festival, this politics is missing. Where is the debate on privatisation at the KLF as PIA workers have been on strike for the past week with two of them having lost their lives? In a sense, the culture of literary festivals in disconnected from what is happening to humanity today. This is perhaps why, while literary festivals become ever more popular, there has been no literary revival in Pakistan.         This dichotomy needs to be overcome. It is this that would make such events truly meaningful to the majority of the people.