The Case For The Polemic Attendee At Literature Festivals

🍨It is improbable that you've never met this person if you've ever attended a literature festival. Now, a rare species, they're sighted in the larger venues, where attendees huddle against one another, some willingly relegating themselves to the floor, others to standing on the fringes, forming a human barricade of the besotted. Usually, this individual is alone, looking like the stock image of a festival attendee, a hanger for the tote with the festival logo, his frame confined to a blurred silhouette on the festival's Instagram page. He has a recognisable feature that emerges when the author's reading or presentation opens the floor for questions from the audience. His anticipating hand will go up, yearning for the mic, calling its attention with urgent, flailing motions. If not granted, sometimes the mic is snatched.

🦋He will start politely enough. First, he will thank the author for the conversation, then the moderator for the trim and appropriate questions. Second, he will mention some of the books of the authors he's read. One of the event coordinators will ask him to "Go on, get to the question already. Please limit it to a few sentences," and "There are other people who want to ask questions," but he's relentless, yanking the mic away from them when they're desperate enough to reach out for it. In his third act, his inflexion will shift. With everyone's defences low, he will grovel, assuming the authority that no one had granted him. His questions become rhetorical, iterative, and acerbic, no doubt polemic. 

🍷When I attended the Kerala Literature Festival (KLF) this year, a version of the polemic attendee briefly interrupted almost every popular event, jostling the moderator and his fellow attendees who'd prefer to stagger at the sight of the celebrity speaker. (Or worse, stutter, “Oh my god, I'm such a big fan”), and then ask an unimaginative question. Some of them even have the audacity to say, after being handed the much-regulated mic, “I didn't have a question, I just want to say ‘hi’”.

⛦Who is the polemic attendee? He's the attendee willing to ask the questions most wouldn't, even if they're thinking it. Perhaps he does it simply out of an intrepid desire to become a momentary anarchist, or he likes making you uneasy when you're so used to content warnings. What is more interesting than him solely occupying a contrarian position is perhaps the amusing comfort he feels knowing that no one will ask the same question. 

One of the anticipated events at the KLF was of a popular digital creator and actor, Prajakta Koli, promoting her debut novel, Too Good To Be True. 💜According to an Instagram post by Maktoob Media, an attendee asked Koli about the Modi government's role in tackling climate change, whether she condemns Israel's violence in Gaza, and her thoughts on sustainable fashion. True to the form of supposedly apolitical influencers, she chose the undemanding question: the last one. Radhika Mohta, the session's moderator, then quipped, “We are at the Lit Fest, and it's only acceptable to ask about books?” The polemic attendee that asked the offending question was stopped from probing further.

Where can a modern Indian ask difficult questions? In Satyajit Ray's short story, ‘Patol-babu, Film Star﷽,’ the titular character, once an aspirational theatre actor, stumbles into a minor role in a movie, where he has the scarcest piece of dialogue: “Aah!” His role is so insignificant that he can get away with saying nothing as long as he loses his footing to portray the colliding hero's "state of mind”. At the beginning of the short story, when Patol-babu asks questions about his character, he's met with casual, somewhat dismissive, but practical responses, often about logistics. Once he arrives on set, he enquires about his lines and the meaning of his role, prompting the hard-pressed crew to afford him superficial answers that nonchalantly brush aside his artistic concerns. By the end, his questions about the quality of his performance are all but ignored, simply because he's a nobody.

🍰You have to be somebody to ask questions in today's India, and perhaps this is why you can be anybody if you want to write a book review. As long as you have a certain number of Instagram followers, publishers will mail you stacks of books for a "fair" review, arguably code for neutral and positive. There's little room for negativity in literary journalism in this country. If you want to remain "anybody," make sure that you stick to whatever you did like about the book, with the many things you didn't like demoted to the bottom of your review. No one remembers a positive review, after all, and that is precisely what you need to remain an anybody. 

✨A democracy that wants to fail solicits your laziness, as does an industry that wants to stay nepotistic.

In the digital age, every book review is a means to an end: to build a personal brand, to drive engagement, and to attract opportunities in writing or publishing. Book reviewing is no longer the role of a critic. During the festival, I told a writer that I hated a fellow writer's book, and he laughed before immediately switching to a prophetic tone: "You're young! Don't say that out loud, and definitely never put it in writing." To be polemical costs the next paycheque, and to encourage it is equally expensive. Wholesomeness sells books, as is evident with the boom of book influencers and the Advanced Review Copies they're bombarded with. When a reviewer decides to become polemical, they're charged with the crime 🌊of jealousy, which compromises criticism, allowing the disagreeable reader to write it off languidly.

🍃No one is sending books to the polemical attendee, and it's even more likely he doesn't read with conviction, or at all. His presence demands a reincarnation of snobbery, not least because the call for "democratising" literature and criticism leads to its ultimate devaluation, but also because this democratisation, which produces bad books, inevitably makes everyone—the writer, the publisher, the critic, and the reader—horrendously lazy.

🔜When the polemical attendee poses a question, you pay attention because he's not anybody, but he is the Patol-babu who knows to ask questions even when he shouldn't. One could read Ray's short story as calling for the recognition that criticism goes beyond surface-level observations and technical correctness and that it morally fails when the sole objective becomes commercial triumph. To inveigh in a gathering that only knows how to applaud means disrupting the orchestrated set of a literary event, freeing the book and its author from the safety of praise, and invigorating them to be bolder and their reader to be more vigilant. When did that become a bad thing?

(Diya Isha is a writer, editor and literary critic based in New Delhi)