Pushkar Fair goes literary

Spicezee Bureau

Jaipur: The famous Pushkar Fair of Rajasthan has taken literary hue this year. Rajasthan’s most famous cattle fair will see a horde of litterateurs and art aficionados joining it in a never before intermix of literature, rural arts and folklore. The internationally famed annual event has one full day on October 31 dedicated to literature. The out of line experiment is a remarkable effort on the part of Rajasthan Tourism Development Corporation, which conducts the fair, and Siyahi, a literary group which is providing support. The one-day literature festival is being explained by the organisers as “an attempt to discover meeting points among contemporary literature and folklore, oral traditions and legends”. The move to introduce literature to the annual cattle fair -- which coincides with Kartik Purnima (full moon day in the month of Kartik) -- seems prompted by the success of the Jaipur Literature Festival which was into its fourth year this January. “The Jaipur Literature Festival already has made a mark. Now we want it to go places,” said Rajasthan’s Tourism Minister Bina Kak talking to The Hindu. “It is an attempt to reach out to a wider audience as the Puskhar Fair has both the foreign tourists and the local people,” she said, adding that tourism and literature would prove complementary to each other. “We have the readings from famous authors in English as well as in Hindi. The audience is to be mixed. Moreover, we have to make a beginning elsewhere in Rajasthan apart from Jaipur in providing such variety to our visitors,” said Ms Kak. The Minister said her department would consider introducing literary events in other cities of Rajasthan such as Jodhpur and Udaipur in future. The first year’s fair at Pushkar will have Namita Gokhale, Anuvab Pal, Jaideep Sahni, Sheen Kaaf Nizam, Prasoon Joshi, Aman Nath and Ved Dhan Sudhir besides Magsaysay Award winner Aruna Roy in conversation with Tarun Tejpal on “Politics of reportage and fiction”. “It is a new genre of tourism,” said Mita Kapur, CEO of Siyahi. “It is a one-day affair there and may not be the same as the Jaipur event,” added Ms. Kapur, one of the founders of the Jaipur Literature Festival. Siyahi is not a part of the Jaipur event anymore though it continues to support it. Will more literary festivals of this kind dilute the now established Jaipur Festival — in which the likes of Salman Rushdie, Suketu Mehta, Mohamed Hanif and Anita Desai have participated -- and pose a challenge to it? “There is no conflict between the two. Pushkar draws its own crowd and it is totally different from that of Jaipur,” asserted Ms Kapur.