Possible institutions: literature festivals and talk-culture in India

This dissertation sets out to understand the proliferation of literature festivals in India since the mid-2000s. These festivals serve cultural, economic and political functions in a dynamic field characterized by varying degrees of competition and co-operation between different literary cultures in multiple languages, the uneven legitimation and reception of culture by different class formations, and the multiple locations where the humanities are practiced. Against this complex setting, I demonstrate that the literature festivals attempt to find unique ways to connect and in turn reimagine a fragmented and plural literary field in the public sphere. This work specifically turns to the producers, managers and the writer-curators of three festivals to understand what drives them and the festivals they curate to produce a network of legitimation for literature in India. The festivals I engage with are the “Jaipur Literature Festival,” the “Indian Languages Festival: Samanvay” and the “Almost Island Dialogues.” I claim that these festivals connect and reimagine the field via a mode of interaction that I call “talk-culture.” As a form of purposeful and conscious (re)turn to conjunctural networks of literary sociality and older forms of public communication, talk-culture is an intimate, face-to-face practice that is a combination of the literary and the critical. In other words, talk-culture is a type of connectivity and framework to reconstitute community. Each chapter locates dispositions and attitudes that emerge out of interactions between writer-curators, the guest speakers, the topics of discussion, audience responses, interviews I conducted with writer-curators, and participant observation. At all three festivals, the possibility of change lies in performing different versions of literary histories and producing knowledges without objectifying or institutionalizing them. This I claim makes their practices ephemeral and engenders attitudes towards literature and literary culture that do not aim towards explicit rulemaking, objectivity and systemization, but at the same time offer a sense of community that performances simulate. That is why I call these events “possible institutions.” The significance of this dissertation rests in the possibility of new academic and non-academic approaches to literature and literary cultures in India. In turning to practices on the ground, the project demonstrates that the often unrehearsed and unintentional practices of writers-curators and the festivals offer alternative ways to approach the complexities of a fragmented, plural, and multilingual literary field. Moreover, this work, attempts to learn from and at the same time support the knowledges that the writer-curators and the festivals produce in the public sphere. The specific literature festivals in this dissertation are spaces where new ways to practice an alternate relationship to literature and literary culture could emerge.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference