Only sound and fury in Jaipur

However, what is the scenario in India today? The truth is that there is hardly any great art and literature in our country today. Where is the Sarat Chandra or Premchand or Faiz of today? Where is the Kabir or Dickens of today?

Today, the people of India are thirsty for good literature which will help them improve their wretched lives (for 80 per cent of our people). If someone writes about people's real problems it will spread like wildfire. But are our writers doing this? Art and literature must serve the people. Writers and artists must have genuine sympathy for the people and depict their sufferings. And not only that, like Dickens and Shaw in England, Rousseau and Voltaire in France, Thomas Paine and Walt Whitman in America, Pushkin, Chernyshevsky and Gorky in Russia, and Sarat Chandra, Nazrul Islam and Subramania Bharati in India, they should inspire people to struggle for a better life, a life which can really be called a decent human existence, and to create a better world, free from injustice, social and economic. Only then will people respect them. In my respectful opinion, art for arts' sake in today's historical context in India only amounts to escapism.

In Jaipur, there was a discussion on Kamasutra and sex, as if this is a pressing economic problem in India today. Ashis Nandy's remark on corruption created a furore, just as the Salman Rushdie episode did last year. Some panellists in a discussion said that China is unlikely to be the next superpower (which is of course an important matter in literature). A lot of journalists narrated their experiences. There was a discussion on the rise and fall of empires. The Indian "elite" descended on Diggi Palace from far and wide, along with filmstars, musicians, and of course foreigners who taught us about literature when there is hardly any great literature today in their own countries, the Dalai Lama (who is no doubt a great authority on literature), etc. And all this was dished out in the name of literature and faithfully lapped up by the 90 per cent!

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