In the space of two months – January and February of 2024 – Sri Lanka hosted three major cultural festivals: The Galle Literary Festival, Matara Festival for the Arts and Ceylon Literary Festival (the latter was held in Kandy and Colombo). These were graced by authors and artistes of varying renown, both local and international. The first two festivals received state patronage and were attended by the president of Sri Lanka, Ranil Wickremesinghe, presenting to the world a supposedly resurgent Sri Lanka that is dusting off the ashes of the economic and political collapse two years ago and emerging as a cultured and cosmopolitan nation.
Yet such highly curated and exclusive displays of seeming cultural sophistication and urbanity are in stark contrast to the everyday reality of most Sri Lankans, who are barely surviving an ongoing economic crisis that, outside the precincts of delusion, never ended. Attendance at most events of the Galle Literary Festival was priced at over LKR 3000 – roughly USD 10 – putting it well beyond the means of a vast majority of Sri Lankans. To drive home the atmosphere of desperation, consider how tens of thousands of Sri Lankans, if not more, have given up on the country altogether and are looking for ways to migrate abroad. In such a context, organising cultural festivals with the express purpose of attracting more tourists – a goal the festivals and the government proclaimed – seems extraordinarily ironic.
Such censure, so thoroughly merited, has been voiced by many local critics. But, particularly this year, the uncomfortable questions to be asked of these festivals do not end there. While such events have always been playgrounds for the socio-cultural elite, they have also increasingly become arenas for state power of both the domestic and international kind – none of which bodes well for the festivals’ cultural credentials.
The Galle Literary Festival was founded by the British-Australian hotelier and real-estate developer Geoffrey Dobbs in 2005 and has gone through several editions. Over the years, many noted literary figures have participated in the event, including well-known Sri Lankan writers such as Shehan Karunatilaka, Romesh Gunesekera and Shyam Selvadurai, as well as international figures such as Vikram Seth, Gore Vidal and Germaine Greer. While the Galle Literary Festival has for the most part been enthusiastically reviewed by the Sri Lankan press, it has not been without controversy. Most notably, in 2011, the Man Booker Prize-winning Indian author Kiran Desai and the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk boycotted the festival after a campaign by Reporters Without Borders that drew attention to the persecution of journalists and artists by the Sri Lankan government of the time. Intellectual activists such as Arundhati Roy and Noam Chomsky also backed the boycott.