Book reading
At The Hindu Prize for Fiction: Readings by the Shortlisted Writers, four authors who were present at The Hindu Lit for Life read out excerpts from their book. The session was moderated by Ziya Us Salam. Sonora Jha, who read out from Foreign , talked about her work on farmers’ suicides when she was a journalist and how the research she had done for that helped write the book. “I was initially researching on journalistic content. But the way the stories were being told, I decided to write it as fiction,” she said. She read out a short excerpt where a farmer sells his kidney to get money for his daughter’s marriage and for the upkeep of two guests who have come to his home.
Amandeep Sandhu talked about life in a military school and being in Punjab during the militancy years. “The 1980s was a decade when a lot happened in the country. But there are no narratives of that time perhaps because we lost being able to hold on to a narrative then,” he said. He read out from his book, Roll Of Honour , the story of a boy who ran away from his past and went back looking for it.
Manjul Bajaj’s book of short fiction has nine stories exploring the spectrum of love. “These nine stories were written over seven or eight years and are based all over the country. When I first went to publishers with short fiction they told me there is no market for this. This came as a shock to me. In Lucknow where I hail from short fiction is considered a powerful form. My stories have strong female characters and are set in exotic locales. I don’t push the envelope much but I guess that is the power of this art,” she said. She read out excerpts from Ripe Mangoes .
Manu Joseph had the audience laughing as he read out a part from The Illicit Happiness Of Other People . “It’s easy to tell your own story but nothing bad had happened to me by then,” he said, “But then I realised that one can’t hide behind a pillar and write. They have to emerge and reveal themselves. So this book is not autobiographical but has elements of my life from my years in Chennai.”
Tell Me A Story
Vikram Sridhar made a group of children walk around the auditorium. “Raise your right hand as if gravity is pulling at it,” he said, and the children raised their hands immediately. “Now keep walking,” he added, strolling around. A little boy walked up to him in a minute. “My hand hurts,” he pouted. “You’ve barely been holding it for a minute,” Vikram smiled.
Tell Me A Story: Workshop on Theatre-based Storytelling, which happened over two days, had the children learning the art of oral story-telling through many different exercises. Right from learning to form different shapes to talking about the importance of a character and how to build it, Vikram had the children listening to his every word.
He asked for comments after narrating a story: what was good about it? What did they not like about the way it was narrated? “Your mannerisms were good,” one boy piped up while another whispered shyly, “It was not very interesting.” Then there were questions on what made a story interesting. Vikram also had the children interview each other to make them aware of how to learn about a person and build a character. At the end of the three-hour session, the children were asked to pick a character (tree, walking stick) and enact a little story on them.
Politics of Sexuality
Three fiercely feminist Tamil poets took to the stage and spoke about the importance of a woman staking claim over her body at Politics of Sexuality: Body As A Site of Violation and Recovery. The panel had poets Anar, Salma and Sharmila and the session was moderated by Prasanna Ramaswamy.
How religion dictates a woman’s body and sexuality was a topic that was much discussed in the session. “There is a need for women to think about their body as they do their mind,” said Anar. English translations of poems of all three poets were read out by actor Rohini.
Salma recounted an incident on a recent trip to Canada.
“I want to talk about how the Indian mindset has trained women. I was at a swimming pool there, fully clothed. One of the women who was taking a bath in the shower room was completely in the nude. And there was a lightness about the way she carried her body. I thought about how we carry our body as a burden while she was so liberated. You continuously feel guilty about carrying it around and that’s how the world makes you feel. They tell you that you must be scared and that your body is profane. I decided the only way out of it is to write and fight these inequalities.”
Sharmila Seyyid talked about how women are treated like gold or shoes, to buy and keep safe or leave out of the home and discard after use.
“Everything is society-dictated. They do not want a woman to express her desires. Even a part of Andal’s Nachiyar Thirumozhi was considered ‘lustful’ because she expresses her desire to be one with the Lord. Eventually, intervention came in the form of those who claimed that it was written by her father.”
