Rewriting the lit fest script literature festivals prioritise

The criticism that Indian literature festivals prioritise English to the detriment of other languages has sparked off much soul-searching among curators

As a journalist who writes about books, I end up attending a lot of literature festivals. While it is true that many of them draw from the same pool of well-known speakers that guarantee packed auditoriums and long queues at book-signing booths, it might be hasty to conclude that if you have been to one, you have seen them all.
 

Each festival has its own flavour, partly because of where it is located, who is hosting it, and where the funding comes from. The local and the regional festivals are as important as the national and global ones from a curatorial standpoint.
 

This year, the Jaipur Literature Festival was at Hotel Clarks Amer, and the Hyderabad Literature Festival was at Vidyaranya High School. The Tata Steel Kolkata Literary Meet had most of its sessions at the Victoria Memorial Hall but some were at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Daga Nikunj, GD Birla Sabhagar, and the Calcutta Cricket and Football Club.
 

The events presented under the literature section of the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival in Mumbai are spread out across the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Bombay Natural History Society and National Gallery of Modern Art. Whether a festival is ticketed or free to enter, audiences make different associations with different locations to assess whether they will be welcome or not. If it is a public space, people have an opportunity to stumble upon it. Venues also have their own regular audiences to tap into and help widen a festival’s reach.
 

The criticism that Indian literature festivals usually prioritise English to the detriment of other languages in which millions of Indians read, write, listen and speak also appears to have sparked off much soul-searching. Festival curators are making an attempt to diversify their programming through the inclusion of sessions that are bilingual or conducted entirely in regional languages. Whether these are merely tokenistic gestures to keep pushback in check, or well-meaning efforts to shake off the colonial hangover, is certainly debatable. This year, the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival hosted a session called “The Right to Write” featuring Dalit women writers of Bengal — Kalyani Thakur Charal, Manju Bala, Kanan Boral and Lily Haldar — in conversation with Sayantan Dasgupta. It was conducted in Bengali. It is crucial that literature festivals make room for marginalised voices from different linguistic backgrounds; people who write only in English cannot possibly speak for everyone.
 

The Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters (MBIFL), which began on February 2 in Thiruvananthapuram and goes on till February 5, has numerous sessions in Malayalam. Apart from that, the festival is also offering live sign language interpretation during several sessions. This is noteworthy because, when the multilingual nature of our society becomes a topic of conversation, sign language is rarely spoken of as a language in its own right. 
 

While giving the keynote speech at this festival, author-screenwriter-filmmaker M T Vasudevan Nair, who got the Jnanpith Award in 1995, articulated his concerns about the gradual extinction of several languages across the world.
 

“This is an issue that calls for serious introspection. It is through the language that the history and culture of a society are expressed.” He added, “It would be hard to come across a Tamil child who cannot recall a few lines of poet Bharathiar, or one in Bengal who cannot recite poems of Rabindranath Tagore. But that may not be the case in Kerala where you would not come across many who can recite lines of Asan, Vallathol and Ulloor — the celebrated poetic trio of Malayalam.”
 

While most literature festivals tend to focus on celebrated names from Europe and North America when they bring international writers to Indian audiences — often in partnership with foreign embassies and consulates — MBIFL is hosting Omani writer and academic Jokha Alharthi this year. She won the Man Booker International Prize in 2019. The large-scale migration from Kerala to the Gulf countries, including Oman, might be one of the reasons behind this choice. Audiences at Indian festivals rarely get to hear writers from West Asia.
 

The food served or sold at festivals, and stalls run by artisans and craftspersons, also become avenues for festival delegates from other states or countries to experience what is local. This form of cultural exchange also serves to open hearts and minds, and can be quite significant especially when people start to get impatient with formal sessions that seem full of jargon.  
 

This year, the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival got author Vir Sanghvi to moderate a panel with three chefs from Kolkata — Doma Wang, Auroni Mookerjee and Shaun Kenworthy. It gave audiences a chance to see how the same city can inspire professionals from the same industry in a variety of ways. It drove home the realisation that cities are a mosaic of culinary histories, and that literature festivals can create moments wherein these are celebrated.