The organisers of the second edition of the Gateway LitFest, India’s newest literary festival, make a case for celebrating Indian languages. Over 50 writers in 15 languages — including Malayalam, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Oriya, Konkani, Assamese, Khasi and Manipuri — will participate this year.
The festival is presented by Malayali literary quarterly Kaakka and communication agency Passion4Communication. Mohan Kakanandan, curator of the festival and editor of a Kaakka, says they wanted to be “inclusive and open to all people”.
The central rationale for the festival articulated lastyear at the festival’s first edition, by one of India’s most loved poets and former chief of Sahitya Akademi Delhi, K Satchidanandan ,remains unassailable. Multi-linguality is a natural part of being Indian, he said. His own language, Malayalam, had absorbed Persian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Arabic for centuries. English was not a problem at all, he had insisted with disarming generosity. “It is just the latest language to have come here. We have so many languages so what’s one more,” he said, and added that it was not necessary to be English-speaking to be cosmopolitan in India. As an adolescent growing up in Kerala, he had read Bengali and Hindi literary classics in Malayalam translation, while also discovering the poetry of TS Eliot. But when a country with 25 languages, 13 scripts, 700 dialects, and hundreds of tribal languages places undue emphasis on one master language, that does seem odd and needs questioning.
The poet had spoken ruefully, but goodnaturedly, of “writers like us being on the margins, not really Page Three material” before changing tack swiftly to speak of the scandalous attacks on Tamil writer Perumal Murugan. An intense political discussion, but without breathless sensationalism, followed. In the end, Satchidanandan read a moving translation of his Malayalam poem, ‘Pardon’ dedicated to Perumal.
Pardon me
For what I have written
For what I could not write
What I am likely to write
And what I may never write
This year, the politics of intolerance and a nasty strain of faux patriotism have plumbed greater depths. “All writers are trying to articulate the turbulent times we live in,” Satchidanandan says. “There is a lot of unease with the suicides by Dalit students, and the killing of writers. Writers have to respond and I hope festivals like these will take up these issues.”
In a sense, language writers do have a closer, more organic link to these events, if only because they speak the language of ordinary people, and are thus better placed to communicate their views and feelings on such events.
The role of English as a homogenising force — described variously by Indian language writers as a depletion of cultural and linguistic richness, indirect enslavement, and oblique colonisation — is likely to feature this year as it did last year. But perhaps the issues are not as simple or straightforward as they appear.
The first session after filmmaker Shyam Benegal’s keynote address is titled ‘Green Shoots in Indian Literature: Are we seeing signs of growth in regional writings despite over dominance of Indo’-Anglian literature? Apart from the awkward articulation, there seems an element of grandstanding present in the very manner that this and some other sessions have been imagined.
Elsewhere in the publicity material the festival is hailed as an event that will ‘put the regional writings on the same pedestal along with Indian writings in English that is hogging the limelight mostly across the literary events.’ Is the festival requesting parity for all languages or a share of the skewed dominance for Indian languages that English currently enjoys? The hint of bombast continues, and unfortunately it detracts from the serious and well conceived-purpose of providing regional writers with a platform.
There is a session on North East literature, Being Pampered or Marginalised,’ chaired by Bangla poet Subodh Sarkar, and another titled ‘Modern Poets are losing depth: Is poetry Facebooked/WhatsApped’ chaired by Gujarati poet, playwright and critic Seetanshu Yashashchnadra. Here the festival seems to be on surer ground, especially with sessions like the one on ‘Malayalam Literature in the Age of Free Markets: Surrendering or resisting,’ chaired by senior journalist MG Radhakrishnan.
Moving seamlessly from literature to film, filmmaker Adoor Gopalkrishnan, one of the advisors of the festival, was asked why films had moved away from literature at a session last year. “Because the further a film goes from reality the greater its chances of success”, was the deadpan reply, in a session that saw equal parts of humour and despair at the state of filmmaking in India. Even badly-made Malayalam films in the 1960s felt true since they were based on literature, the filmmaker had pointed out.
This year Gopalkrishnan chairs a session titled, ‘Real Life vs Fiction in Films, Do Indian films show an increasing tilt towards real life stories over fiction.’ Gopalkrishnan says, “New attempts in filmmaking are being made today. This was not there in the past as the entire system is very cautious and does not want to move away from the formula.”
Perhaps Seetanshu Yashashchandra, Gujarati language poet, playwright and academic says it best when he says he is tired of all this talk of globalisation and markets. “Even if I’m not known outside Gujarat and Baroda I’m not going to play games for fame and money. The globalisation debate is pulling us away from being writers. Real regional writing is very difficult to translate.”
And paradoxically, it is on its own terms that it needs to be appreciated even in a nation shedding languages by the day.
The Gateway Litfest starts today at the NCPA Experimental theatre. See gatewaylitfest.com for details
The author is an arts writer and founder of First Edition Arts
