Ghosh and Litfests

A brilliant response to a cautiously written classical worldview of 'the author'. I am reminded of Steve Waugh's most brilliant remark to Brian Lara, "You walk only when it suits you!" Indeed, anyone who attends these book launches can only betray his poor wisdom by taking that classical position. But then, Ghosh belongs to that league of poor authors (Yes, poor, not ordinary. Chetan Bhagat, the mall writer, is ordinary!) who plough through words without any talent for it. His yawn-inducing unfinishable novels are, at best, diligent. That ivory tower in which he sits reflects as much of his bankruptcy as of his readers, their collective disability to understand control as an aesthetic choice. Instead of excavating an impossibility, they spit words on the page and celebrate the graffiti, minus its rebellious connotation of course. After all, it is a contract between the passed-over. Together, they form a public that imagines itself as 'the public', and like all such notions, inclusivity is hardly a concern there. Ghosh is too dependent on his ethnographic lens when setting out in search of the subjects.

But the litfests Binoo defends are not yet there, not the JLF at least. The idea may sit in harmony with popular culture but the practice is hardly up to that mark, the counterpublics are completely absent yet. What Binoo defends however is a future in the shaping, not so much its present. He is protecting something he himself is labouring with and does not want nipped in the bud. Ghosh is simply caught on the wrong foot. It is perfectly alright for him to feel uncomfortable in a litfest for it does not aid his writing, but in deriding the tamasha conceptually, he oversteps his own caution. He forgets that it is precisely because writing is now coming within the orbit of tamasha that he is celebrated by these tamashbeens. Or else, let alone smoothly penetrating into curricular line-up, he would have struggled to find readership among friends. This is already one achievement for the litfest debate. This has made possible a close scrutiny of some of the most celebrated native outsiders who champion the cause of Indian writing in English. Many of them have been found with feet of clay, and more are counting themselves.

http://www.firstpost.com/living/in-defense-of-litfests-four-reasons-amitav-ghosh-gets-it-wrong-208331.html