Our first lit meet was born… thanks to Jaipur!

There are many reasons that make Calcutta THE obvious choice for hosting a big, fat literary meet. It is the city that gave birth to India’s only literature Nobel laureate. This is where the first Indian novel in English (Rajmohan’s Wife by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, 1864) was written. This is the city that has the largest book fair in the country. There is only one reason that it does not, as yet, have a large-scale literary meet. Calcutta never sees, or acknowledges, its obvious strengths.

I remember going to the 2010 Jaipur Literature Festival (picture top by PTI of Tom Stoppard and William Dalrymple at this year’s festival). And while I was impressed by the easy informality with which Nobel laureates brushed shoulders with readers, I was “talked out” in five sessions. I did the sensible thing and headed to Anokhi to shop. I met a lady who lived in Jaipur, saw my delegate pass and asked if I was enjoying the meet. I said I was and that she must be proud of the JLF. Instead of agreeing, she firmly stated: “It’s not for us who live in the city. It’s got nothing to do with the people of Jaipur.”

She might have been a stray malcontent, but the lady got me thinking. I knew one city that would embrace a literary meet possessively and ensure that it belonged first to its own people, before inviting the world in. It was my city.

I discussed the idea of a literary meet in Calcutta with a lady sitting beside me on my flight back to Calcutta. She turned out to be Sujata Sen, director, British Council, East India. Besides being a good listener, she is also a committed Calcuttan who has been the patron saint of the Calcutta Literary Meet dream after that fortuitous flight.

I gave up the dream by August 2010 and thought it was simply not meant to be. However, 14 months later, Sujata Sen called me and said the Publishers and Booksellers Guild wanted to host a literary event at Book Fair 2012.

The Guild, from the outside, is an inscrutable, closed and much-maligned group — I did not know what to expect. But along came a group of friendly, benign gentlemen, and thus began the Calcutta Literary Meet.

The asking rate was high, with just four months left and the entire literary world to invite. Gameplan has no literary contacts. The odds were stacked against us. I have not written a book, never taught anyone (except my uncomplaining sons) and did not have the first idea about publishing. We sent letters to all the writers we enjoyed reading, and the replies poured in — polite regrets.

Then, on November 24, an email came in exceptionally large font size, signed “Vikram”.

There is a moment when things take shape. For us, the Vikram Seth moment was when our Lit Meet got wings. We have worked for a decade with Imran Khan and we pleaded with him to come for half a day. He agreed, but we have our fingers firmly crossed. Confirmations suddenly began to trickle in.

There were the popular younger authors like Chetan Bhagat, Amish, Sarnath Banerjee, Mohammed Hanif, Rahul Bhattacharya and several others. We also decided to introduce some young foreign writers like Shehan Karunatilaka, Kapka Kassabova, Alessandro Baricco, Craig Taylor and Nicolas Wild to Calcutta’s book lovers.

And most importantly there was the pantheon from Bengali literature to provide literary meat to the literary meet — Mahasweta Devi, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, Samaresh Majumdar, ‘Sankar’ and Joy Goswami to name a few — who readily agreed.

Big challenges still exist, and we will need a year to get better. Our auditorium is now a little igloo compared with what we had planned, but fire concerns are too serious to play around with. We know that we will not be able to seat our audiences as comfortably as we hoped and we apologise right away. The flyover construction near Milan Mela will make coming to the venue a bit of a fight. We need a year to get things in order.

Kudos to the Guild for standing by us firmly. Thank you to Amit Chaudhuri and Kunal Basu for patient ears and sound advice. To Chandril Bhattacharya and Anindya Chattopadhyay for all the help with the Bengali sessions and magical lyrics. And, of course, to Shantanu Moitra, Kaushiki Desikan and Monali Thakur for our theme song Ei pata oi pata (picture below by Amit Datta shows them belting it out at the Calcutta Book Fair inauguration on Tuesday), which has already gone common cold but could go viral if you visit the Calcutta Literary Meet Anthem often enough on YouTube.

The Calcutta Literary Meet is about to begin, and this one’s for our city.

Because a lit meet belongs here. Obviously.

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