On January 27, 2017, by the banks of the Lake Fewa, journalist Kanak Mani Dixit and historian Ramachandra Guha were to hold a convivial conversation as distinguished panelists of the Nepal Literature Festival (NLF). Kanak had come well-prepared with a suitable headgear. When it began to drizzle and the chill in the air shot up, Ram had to ask for a cap from a member of the audience to cover his partially balding head. This year, the organisers have chosen a more appropriate date—between February 15 and 19—to host the 11th edition of the NLF at Barahighat grounds.

The Kuda Karnalika lit-fest is scheduled to be held between February 17 and 19 at the Bulbule Udyan in Surkhet. Soon afterwards, the fifth edition of the Janakpur Literature Festival will happen between February 22 and 24. The five-day-long fourth International Janakapurdham Festival of Art, Literature and Theatre has just concluded. Literature festivals have become a part of the cultural calendar even in places as far afield as Tikapur and Ilam.

The complaint that speakers are mostly ferried from Kathmandu at all such events is partially true. But equally powerful is the argument that locals get to listen to and interact with presenters they had known only through the media. From their humble beginning as book exhibitions where authors, publishers and distributors once assembled to showcase their work to the interested public, literature festivals have become a part of the “public culture”, where conversations are mixed with poetry recitals, musical presentations, dance performances, food-fests and art exhibitions in a carnivalesque atmosphere.

In neighbouring India, literature festivals have become a significant component of the cultural industry. It all began in 2006 with the Jaipur Literature Festival when two prominent writers joined hands with an entrepreneur of the art industry to organise an assembly of writers, poets, public intellectuals, politicos and socialites to promote conversations primarily about Indian writing in English. The exotic locale of the royal city in Rajasthan was near enough to New Delhi but rather distant from language chauvinists of the Hindi heartland.

Literary cultures

All literary cultures require a certain level of literacy, familiarity with philosophical thoughts and the ability to appreciate arts, music, theatre and literature that civilise the mind, nourish the soul, uplift the heart and create a society of conscious individuals. Ever since the discovery of symbolic expressions scratched on the walls of caves, edicts engraved upon stone tablets or messages etched upon clay pots, the power of the written word is thought to hold magical properties. Other art forms, such as dance, drawing, music and singing, are perhaps much older than the invention of letters. Even the tradition of storytelling predates their collections in the written form. The purposeful use of writing, however, holds the power to change or maintain social relations.

Raw power, exercised through coercion, is the oldest, easiest and crudest way of creating conformity. It can also be transitory: There is always someone more powerful who wants to have more of it through tangible threats. Collaboration with others can be achieved through inducement by promising payment or a share in the exercise of power. These two forms of hard power have dominated all contestations throughout human history.

The exercise of soft power to maintain what has been achieved through the use of hard power—be it coercion, collaboration or a combination of the two—requires what has been called the manufacture of consent. Since most people want to believe in what they hear and see, it’s not very difficult for propagandists to propagate their interests as those of everyone else. Smart strategists often blend the tools of hard and soft power to establish and maintain control over the masses.

However, power only is seldom enough to maintain social order. The earliest form of exercising invisible influence was through the propagation of religion, which, in essence, is the fear of the Omnipresent, Omniscient and Almighty God. Instead of fear, the power of culture is based upon the belief that if one tries hard enough, circumstances of birth can be changed and higher status achieved in this life. The struggle between despair and hope is the fundamental theme of all arts, more so in literature.

Sometime in the early naughties, the free and unmoderated flow of expressions on the internet began to subtly challenge the influence of philosophers, poets, literary creators and littérateurs that had traditionally set the boundaries of acceptable thought. The standards of high culture, defined as “the self-consciousness of a society”, began to be transformed as Facebook and Twitter (Now Meta and X, respectively) emerged as platforms of what can be called “consociational culture”. Inspired by the vocabulary of politics, where consociationalism implies “a stable democratic system in deeply divided societies that is based on power sharing between elites from different social groups”, consociational culture is ostensibly a celebration of diversities that helps maintain existing power balance without challenging the status quo.

Discursive arts

Over a decade ago, entrepreneurs behind the Bookworm Foundation began the NLF experiment from a shamiyana erected on the premises of Moksh at Jhamsikhel in Lalitpur to accommodate about 200 curious participants. If memory serves me right, it had begun to rain, and participants at the edges had to pull their chairs inside the tent as a few volunteers held the flimsy canopy in place with the help of whatever stick they could get their hands on. Loosely patterned after the JLF in India, the NLF was soon attracting some established names from all over South Asia. Perhaps the decision to take the NLF to Pokhara was a brilliant move: It helped mix the business of literary discourse with the pleasure of tourism in a place where mountains and streams meet in a rain-soaked lakeside valley.

French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926–1984) posits that “discourse”—the use of written or spoken communication to construct knowledge—benefits the most powerful in society and can be used as a form of social control. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) defines taste as a product of history reproduced by education that is used to distinguish a society's elite from the rest of the masses. By synthesising the Foucauldian formulation of power/knowledge and the Bourdieusian exposition of “cultural capital”, it is possible to argue that something that can best be termed the “literature of discourse” helps entrench existing hierarchy through literature festivals.

Perhaps that is the reason why the profit sector finds it attractive to loosen the strings of its CSR purse for eclectic gatherings where everyone is something more—poets are public intellectuals, novelists become opinion makers, journalists wear the hat of literary critics, and celebrities pose as arbiters of artistic taste in a convivial atmosphere. Literary carnivals help aspiring politicos socialise with socialites that are still famous for having once been famous. Entrepreneurs of the NGO industry masquerade as activists, and business tycoons pretend to be philanthropists. Having been an insider-outsider at many such events, I can vouch for their primary utility: They offer an occasion of indulging in the guiltless pleasures of the middlebrow bourgeois culture! The lit-fest is a stage of performing arts with intrinsic and instrumental values.