I was in Jaipur when the Literature Festival was on, and intended to go there, but was dissuaded by some friends who said it would be a waste of time. So what I learnt about it was from newspapers, television and the Internet.

To put it in briefly, I was totally disappointed. Much of the time was wasted on Salman Rushdie, whom I regard as a very mediocre writer who would have been unknown to most people but for The Satanic Verses. Much of the ‘Literature' Festival was really a caricature. There were, of course, serious writers too whose work deals with the problems of the people but they received no attention in comparison.

That set me thinking: Where is serious literature anywhere to be seen? Why blame this festival alone?

There are two theories about art and literature. The first, ‘art for art's sake' and the second, ‘art for social purpose'.

According to the first theory, art and literature are meant only to create beautiful or entertaining works, to please and entertain people and the artists themselves, and not to propagate social ideas.

If art and literature are used to propagate social ideas, they become propaganda. Proponents of this view include Keats, Tennyson, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot in English literature; Edgar Allan Poe in American literature; Agyeya and the ‘Reetikal' and ‘Chayavadi' poets in Hindi literature; Jigar Moradabadi in Urdu and Tagore in Bengali.

Literature should serve people

The other theory is that art and literature should serve the people, and help them in their struggle for a better life, by arousing emotions against oppression and injustice. Proponents of this school are Dickens and George Bernard Shaw in English literature; Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck in American literature; Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert and Victor Hugo in French; Goethe, Schiller and Erich Maria Remarque in German; Cervantes in Spanish; Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky and Maxim Gorky in Russian; Premchand and Kabir in Hindi; Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay and Kazi Nazrul Islam in Bengali, Bharati in Tamil and Nazir, Faiz, Josh and Manto in Urdu.