Islamabad Literary Festival: Civil Society’s Day Out

uivaLiterary festivals have become quite a South Asian phenomenon in recent years.  In India they have taken off in Jaipur, Chandigarh, Delhi, Kochi, Pune, Goa and a host of other locations.  In Pakistan they have been taking place in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad for the last five years or so.  The Islamabad Literary Festival 2017 took place at the Margala Hotel over the Easter weekend.

I have been attending the Lahore Literary Festival since it began, but this was my first time at its Islamabad equivalent.  I find these events really heartening: it is undeniably encouraging to see thousands and thousands of people giving up their weekend to pack out a hotel in the centre of the city and listen to people giving lectures on the history of Pakistani literature in English, on Urdu poetry, or discussing recurrent themes in contemporary Pakistani literature.

Foreign observers have thankfully stopped finding this bizarre.  In the early days of the Lahore Literary Festival correspondents from the UK and the US covered the event in tones of mild bemusement, employing gratuitously sensational phrases describing Lahorites dodging bombs to attend the festival.  The festivals have been running for long enough now that they have become part of the social landscape, and foreigners air-dropped in to observe the event at the behest of some desk-bound editor no longer find them surprising.  The sight of thousands of Pakistani people coming together to talk about books is no longer weird, as if it ever should have been.

These festivals, after all, provide an opportunity for Pakistani’s “liberal elite” to enjoy a day in the sun.  I do not use that term negatively.  Why should it be negative?  The liberal elite of Pakistan have significant influence on society and use that influence positively and constructively.  They come in their thousands to talk about poetry and novels, as well as less obviously literary topics such as Pakistan’s looming water crisis, and they clearly care.  They do not come up with solutions to Pakistan’s problems – how could they, in a three-day event? – but the fact that discussions are ongoing, and passionately, is a positive start in itself.

The narrative about Pakistan is overwhelmingly negative.  It is good to be able to report that thousands of people were willing to come out, discuss poems, buy novels, drink tea, and chat politely with anyone they could find.  Clearly, it’s not all bad news.