The Jaipur Literature Festival often brings writers and scholars from around the world, along with subjects that truly stretch the boundaries of literature. Here are our picks from the fourth day:
Cupid’s arrow and Kama’s bow
“If it is the sex lives of the ancients you’re after, you might as well leave now,” warned art historian Caroline Vout at the beginning of a presentation of the research that led to her book Sex on Show: Seeing the Erotic in Greece and Rome. Instead, Vout said, her research is about how Greeks and Romans used erotic images to make sense of the world.
A large part of modern British prudery about images such as these, which are found on objects such as drinking cups and pottery, is because of Victorianism, explained Vout. She added that it was in the Victorian era that these objects were thought through only in terms of their beauty, and that many erotic images were taken off display at museums, and put in secret cabinets.
Vout explored the eroticism of religious and mythological imagery, such as figurines of the goddess Aphrodite and depictions of satyrs. She made the connection between sexual desire and communion with the divine, arguing that legends of the Greek gods’ promiscuity exist according to the same logic. “It was as if in order to be a god, you have to do gender differently,” she said.
Vidya Dehejia put her work in conversation with Vout’s, showing a picture of a yakshi from the Sanchi Stupa, saying that such a figure was both suggestive and auspicious, signifying fertility, growth, and abundance. She argued that unlike Greek and Roman erotic imagery, much of the erotic material in India can be seen in context, and that images of couples having sex exist right next to the deity in temples.
“In our embarrassment, we’ve forgotten that this is about the joy of life, of love and of sex. Texts tell you not to bypass any of the steps of karma, artha, and kama on the path of moksha,” she said.
“In Greek myth, if you see a goddess naked, and she doesn’t want you to look at her, you’re in trouble. If you think you’re the one in power, more fool you.”
— Caroline Vout
Redrawing the lines of the Partition
The violence can never go out of the Partition. The day began with a hugely informative panel, peopled by some of the finest contemporary scholars of the Partition: Ayesha Jalal, Urvashi Butalia, Nisid Hajari, Venkat Dhulipala, and Yasmin Khan.
And what was the source of the violence? Hajari said that in accounts of the violence that took place during the Partition, the trope of madness “is the easiest one to seize upon,” but it isn’t necessarily accurate. He argued that this explanation is a way not to take responsibility, saying, “the scale of mass ethnic cleansing was not spontaneous.”
Jalal argued that a close analysis of events would reveal that no single pattern emerges that can explain the violence, but that in many cases the violence was not so much about religion as it was about the acquisition of property.
Butalia said that it was an already existing base for violence that made subsequent violence possible, saying that the men in families were only able to kill women because they were already violent to them. She also argued that the notion of the minority is not just religious, saying, “Dalits were a minority in the Punjab, there were Parsis, hijra communities, people in mental hospitals… deeply unequal relationships caused the widespread violence.”
Dhulipala contended that there was no unanimity among Muslims about the Partition. “Some of the most trenchant critics of the Partition came from the Muslim community,” he said. He added that the transfer of populations is a dehumanising concept, looking at “people as objects that can be moved hither and thither.”
Yasmin Khan warned against the risk of “replaying the same tropes over and over again, boiling the Partition down to the trains full of poeple.” In order to be truly empathetic to the people who suffered this violence, she said, we need individual and multiple stories that can give us human insight.
Butalia referred to the “different kinds of memory-work and archival work” on the Partition, being done in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, including books like the graphic narratives of This Side, That Side and projects such as the Citizen’s Archive in Pakistan.
Jalal said that narratives about how communities helped each other need to be told over and over again.
“Why don’t you see hundreds of TV shows about Partition?”
— Urvashi Butalia
The shadow of the slave trade
British-Guyanese writer Fred D’Aguiar, Jamaican poet and writer Kei Miller, and Ghanian-American philosopher and author Kwame Anthony Appiah participated in this illuminating session. The high point of this session was an incredibly moving reading by Miller of his poem Place Name: Oracabessa.
D’Aguiar spoke about the “intuitive memory of slavery”, a “history of feeling pain”, that manifests itself viscerally. He spoke of feeling this pain when being beaten as a child in Guyana, saying that he could not understand why someone who loved him would want to hurt him.
Miller, too, said that the residue of this memory remains in everyday life in Jamaica. “Every day carries a long trail behind,” he said. He spoke about being left “deeply disturbed” by the conversions of Great Houses in Jamaica into hotels. “You wouldn’t turn a gas chamber into a four-star hotel,” he said.
Miller expressed his frustration with the use of slavery as a trope by Jamaican poets. “Bad Jamaican poetry is all about slavery,” he said, “It slips into cliché, into an easy exploitation of pain.” D’Aguiar agreed, saying that there “is a huge movement to forget slavery, and replace its memory with something more cheerful.” However, he argued that thinking through and writing about slavery is “a necessary baptism” for writers.
Miller pointed to the hypocrisy of privileged young Jamaican poets who are given expensive cars by their parents, and then proceed to go up on stage in order to recite poetry against oppression.”But [they] are the oppressor,” he said, “and they have no absolutely no inkling of this.” Miller said that it is important to think through how to challenge this obvious inequality without “hiding behind skin”, and that the way to do so would be to be “brutally honest and self-aware”.
Why does it all sound so familiar?
“One of my favourite subjects is Columbus, who supposedly discovered the Caribbean. What an offensive word - ‘discovered’.”
— Kei Miller