So here you are at Jaipur on the 3rd day of the Jaipur Literary Festival, that literary fest that has been tagged the biggest literary festival in the world. There you are, seated beneath a big colourful tent filled with people listening to a famous Indian author as he reads in Hindi. It’s late afternoon; a cool - yet sunny - winter evening with chirping birds and the deep smell of horse droppings from the adjoining stables mingling with the rich smell of coffee from the nearby concession stand; in a collaborative effort that succeeds at confusing your olfactory lobes.
You forgive the horses easily for the intrusion having seen how elephants, camels and horses share the streets with automobiles and auto rickshaws. This is India, and horses are not out of place at literary festivals.
It matters less that you had spent close to 48 hours journeying to get here. That the 17 hour flight from Lagos to Delhi had been stretched by 8 hours due to bad weather during the stop over at Doha, that the subsequent six hour drive from Delhi to Jaipur was just as tiring, that you had missed two days of the festival already and had missed Soyinka’s – your countryman’s - session. You were here, that was what mattered, so you sought out one of the three sessions that were running simultaneously at that moment and tried to tap into the gist of the thing. Titled Migrant Words, Hanif Kureishi, Sadia Shepard and Tania James were assembled to discuss the self, the other, identity, barriers and borders and all those other things that preoccupy writers especially because they are the ones who bother to articulate the angst felt from contradictions that arise from space, place and identity. Blah ,blah, Sadia remarked about how her name elicited questions about her mixed muslim and christian parentage from fellow Indians, while Americans simply smiled and said she had a nice name, blah, blah, blah, Hanif (that guy with the deadpan responses must have been Hanif) cracked up the audience with his confused and apt responses to confusing questions about confusion in the writers’ minds particularly those that arise from complex issues of identity, blah, blah, typical writerly stuff on migration and identity. At least you learned a new acronym - ABCD- American Born Confused Desis.
You wander away after they’re through, browse through the books on display and find your way back to the hall just in time to catch what turns out to nearly be the greatest eureka moment of the evening. In a session tagged The Ascent of Money (similar to the roundtable discussion on motivational literature and financial intelligence held at CORA’s 11th Lagos Book & Art Festival in November 2009) and moderated by Omair Ahmad, Niall Ferguson gives a virtuoso performance as he delights his audience with deep insight into the world’s current economic landscape and India’s place in that flux.
Ferguson’s performance saw his book selling out at the exhibiting bookstore right near the hall, within minutes of his presentation, showing that Indians and foreigners alike are keenly interested in India’s position in the global milieu. That is to be expected, Indians are in constant engagement with the rest of the world in one way or the other, India probably has the largest diaspora population in the world and that should explain why Indian authors can easily spend 30 minutes discussing their migrant angst. This, however, is why Ferguson’s book sold out so quickly- he’d come to tell the audience that the ‘Empire’ had subverted itself and the underlying sense of Karma behind such a statement can not be lost on any self respecting Indian.
You start to pay attention when he explains that India’s current economic strength was derived neither from foreign trade, Foreign Direct Investment, nor the gains of globalization in the strict sense, but from savings and investments within their own economy and patronage of Indian products by Indians. Making you have a double take however, he continued by saying that the said economic growth was still not moving at the kind of pace at which China was developing, partly due to India’s relative aloofness to the global market.
Although this same aloofness had protected India from feeling the brunt of last year’s recession the way China felt it, India’s economy is still not as big as China’s which triples India’s and would soon quadruple it. Ferguson went on to identify the large gap between the rich and the poor in India as another indicator that the economy was yet to peak. According to him, the meaningful debate we should be having should not be about whether we should regulate capital, but about what sort of regulation of capitalism we must have, given that other alternatives to capitalism have proven to be quite worse in reducing the said disparity between rich and poor in other parts of the world in the past fifty years. In that context, Ferguson cites the ability of the individual to secure his right to land as an indicator of the strength of an economy, India still falls short in this regard, from his observation that it takes 265 days to get a construction permit in India…at that rate, growth, even if limited to the physical sense of the word, can not be exponential. Yet he believes India is catching up with China and would rather stake his investments in India than in China. He holds this view not just because he believes in India - compared to China - there is the rule of law, but also because of his anecdote on the hare and the tortoise. The hare being super-fast China, while the wise and slow tortoise is cautious India. While the hare races forward at top speed, as the fable goes, the tortoise keeps a slow and steady pace, the hare naturally has to stop to catch its breath at intervals, but the tortoise just keeps going. Ferguson is staking his money on slow and steady winning the race. While his comparison of the Indian scenario with the Chinese scenario on the issue of rule of law might be debated, his avowal that the gap between the haves and have nots needs to be closed for economic stability and the need for markets to be regulated have been validated by recent history. Just as interesting in a historical context is his observation that Indian companies have suddenly found themselves sufficiently empowered to buy over British companies, exemplifying a growing notion that the world is tilting back to the east. The West - more so Britain than the United States - had been over stretched economically while the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans and the Indians had been steadily building wealth. Hence, he opines, Indians should be happy.
Ferguson must love the sub continent. He lauded the nation’s democratic stability compared with other former British colonies, especially in sub- Saharan Africa (sic: Nigeria), and offered the opinion that the economic boom China was experiencing was vulnerable for as long as China remained a one party state without a commensurate growth in political stability. Essentially, Ferguson is an obvious indophile, however, his great enthusiasm for the sub-continent seems to have ignored two key factors in his choice of India over China: 1. China still beats India at the game of numbers and that remains even more vital in today’s politics and economics on a global platform. 2. China might remain bullish and autocratic on the political front, however, the world is still a school yard that makes space for the school bully- America’s sustained role in global economics today despite its military mis-adventures and the recession should say something about that. 3. It would appear that Ferguson forgets that the emergence of the East is much more a product of intangible qualities like cultural and philosophical tenets that have slowly permeated into management systems and refined western style processes into more efficient systems; than Havard style econometrics or just a fairytale result of the unfolding of democratic rule and the adoption of almighty capitalism. As capitalism is being forced to adopt a more humane face, so was Communism forced to reinvent itself. Pundits argue that an amalgam of both, a more social form of capitalism, somewhat akin to what obtains in Europe, will be the future for many nations.
Ferguson’s postulations are useful to note nonetheless: that China’s economy will soon get eroded, that he is more concerned of potential conflict between the world’s most populous countries than of any crisis in the middle east, that China will slow down and India will catch up, that India will soon have an aging population and will have to pay attention to demographics to be able to sustain its economic growth and that one fifth of the world’s population will be Indian by 2050.
So apart from how Ferguson’s book sold out after his lecture, of what other relevance is such an intense discussion on world economics to a literary festival adjudged to be the world’s greatest? If the world is tilting to the west and India is poised to take the lead of such a new world order, then it is most useful to pay more attention to what Indian writers think and feel about themselves and the rest of the world, because writers are the plumb line for a people’s soul. Is that why you are now paying more attention to all that writerly talk, about Hanif Kureishi’s confusions about a world confused over confused identities and Sadia Shepard’s angst over a multi-religious parentage; and about American Born Confused Desis.
In understanding their worries, do you seek to understand yours better, coming from a similar pluralistic, multi-religious, multi-ethnic, culturally confused, highly populated and much more under achieving nation? You wander to the next session, feeling like a Maharajah.
-Ayodele Arigbabu.
Jaipur, 23-01-10.
