ABSTRACT
In photo and video footage of the 2013 Jaipur Literature Festival, the name of the event's sponsor is impossible to miss. On banners adorning crowded entranceways, and backdrops to speaking events, the festival's 2013 motto, “Carnival of Values,” appears beneath the insignia of Tata Steel, echoing the company slogan, “Values Stronger than Steel.” By its own reckoning, the company's sponsorship of the festival reflects its foundational commitment to service and belief in “the interconnectivity of the enterprise, the environment and the community” (Tata Steel Ltd. 2011, 2). However, as its 2009–2010 report to shareholders also hints, Tata Steel's turn to philanthropy also comes in response to a business climate buffeted by the 2008 financial crisis and by growing demands for corporate responsibility. In a variety of ways, sponsorship of the literary festival bolsters the Tata brand by highlighting the company's expansiveness and flexibility. In a (Tata Steel-sponsored) NDTV program about the festival, company vice president, Partha Sengupta, responds to a gently lobbed question about the surprising association of the “great huge industrial giant” with an “intellectual melting pot of culture and books”: “Steel is associated as being staid and boring. […] So we thought we would make it interesting, make it more colourful, make it more approachable. The concept is fantastic, the literature fest is wonderful, and we have found our place under the sun, because we have found like-minded people” (“Jaipur Lit Fest” 2013). The message manages to be both conservative and liberal, suggesting that Tata Steel saw its own long-held values echoed in the literary festival, but also that the company recognized the need to change and update its brand in the fact of changing times. A skeptical reading might argue that Tata Steel's image needed burnishing not because of the boring reputation of steel, but because of the Tata Group's track record of violently displacing adivasi (tribal people) and farmers from their lands (“Orissa tribals” 2011; “Singur Land” 2013). Tata's move is part of a trend, scathingly observed by Arundhati Roy (2012), in which mining companies “have embraced the Arts—film, art installations and the rush of literary festivals that have replaced the ’90s obsession with beauty contests.” The rationale seems to be this: that the problems of resource depletion, pollution, and human rights abuses will fade in significance amidst the happy clamor of a “carnival of values.”
