Baby steps to think, learn, grow

We had kept a canvas near the Calcutta Literary Meet auditorium for all the participating authors and speakers to sign, with the aim of creating a memento of Lit Meet-I. There were the signatures of all the writers who spoke on the first day. However, by the second evening, it was overrun by signatures, not just of the writers, but of those who saw the canvas in the Dickens Reading Room, and just felt like signing on it.

So there we were with a canvas, where Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, John Keay and Mohammed Hanif’s signatures were jostling for space with Jamuna Bagchi and Taton. That was the ultimate compliment for those of us who dreamt, toiled and brought this Lit Meet to Calcutta. We had said it was not just about the writers, and the canvas was clinching proof that this literature meet was about Calcutta’s booklovers.

From session one when Vikram Seth ignited the stage with “fa-yaah” and “dizayaah”, through to the fiery welcome accorded to Imran Khan to the final session where Mahasweta Devi illumined us about her memories of Rabindranath Tagore, there was a brightness that shone through the Calcutta Literary Meet. This had nothing to do with our organisational skills — it had everything to do with the writers who without exception declared that they were thoroughly impressed with the questions that came from the audiences.

The first day we overshot our timings but after that we were pretty punctual. The only other day we overshot was when Imran came to the UBI Auditorium and his arrival was stalled by adoring mobs. Imran has never set the hustings on fire in Pakistan, but if there was an election at the Book Fair that day, he would have been elected to the Milan Mela seat with a whopping margin.

The speech he gave elicited mixed reactions from those who were there, some feeling it was naïve and others declaring it earnest. The evening ended in some chaos with a 55-second power cut. While in darkness, Imran said power cuts lasting up to eight hours were a very common feature in Pakistan’s metros. We immediately concluded that it was his presence then, which caused the lines to trip. He graciously accepted blame, adding that a true leader is one who can see a radiant future beyond momentary darkness.

Our morning sessions were often sparsely populated, but each of the speakers made it a point to tell us that they were fine with it because it was proof that those who came were really keen to be there. Dr Upinder Singh, Anita Nair and Prof. Tomaso Belloni all warned us against the danger of getting enslaved or over-obsessed by the need to fill up seats, and instead told us to soldier on by retaining academic sessions of high quality.

Our After Hours too went off swimmingly, with Ileana Citaristi and Totakahini flanking more popular acts like Purbayan Chatterjee, Chandrabindoo and Shantanu Moitra. There was also a lovely evening with Guru Dutt’s black-and-white classics highlighted by Sathya Saran.

We have learnt a lot from this year, and as promised we will be back, though I suspect that we might have opened the lit fest floodgates for others to come in. We can be allowed to feel a little proud about being the first fest of some scale in this city, and whoever comes in now will be following our baby footsteps into the city’s cultural scene.

When we invited the speakers, we told them that they could stay on for as long as they wished since we wanted them to get to know Calcutta. Whether it was Moni Mohsin, who raided Byloom (the sari shop), Kapka Kassabova, who has sworn to return after seeing Dakshineswar, or Mohammed Hanif, who enjoyed Royal biryani even though there are no potatoes in it, they all responded to the city with great warmth and affection. Shehan Karunatilaka loved the Eden Gardens, where some of his novel’s action is set, but loved Victoria Memorial even more.

The idea was always to showcase the city to the writers just as much as we were showcasing the writers to the city. We did not have Beautiful Bengal sponsoring us, so we simply launched our own Captivating Calcutta campaign.

We have learnt a lot in this past week, and the mistakes we made were pointers for how to improve next year. My own personal take-home was Justice (retd) Leila Seth, who said we must hold a child gently on an open palm, rather than in a firm grasp that might stifle, making the child desperate to break away. Our Lit Meet needs the same open palm. We must nurture it without restricting it with over-planning and overriding ambition. Only then will it make mistakes, develop and find its full potential as an event that makes all those involved think, learn and grow.

Travellers’ tales & ‘Sir Bhagat’

The Calcutta Literary Meet, held at Milan Mela in association with The Telegraph, ended after an exciting six days on January 31. Highlights from the last three days:

How many miles?

How many miles must a writer travel/Before he or she can be called one?

Some of the greatest writers have been weird. Proust wrote much of In Search of Lost Time from his Boulevard Haussman apartment in Paris, where he lined his bedroom with cork panels that acted as soundproofing and absorbed dust. He shuttered his double windows and drew the heavy blue satin curtains close. He was paranoid.

But that was a century ago, the Wright Brothers were just settling into their business and cheap airfares had not been invented. Today the novelist is an intrepid traveller who jumps continents in search of his or her subject. Some of them were present at the just-concluded meet.

Bored with his homeland, cricket writing, the here and the now, Rahul Bhattacharya took off for Guyana, and wrote The Sly Company of People Who Care, and he can curse fluently in Creolese.

Kapka Kassabova, born in Bulgaria, moved to New Zealand, wrote a book about her homeland, where she hated living. She was in Ecuador, about which she has written a novel, and has lived in Buenos Aires for 10 years to learn tango. She talks about things like “tangida”, a state of tango, which combines melancholy and existential angst and ecstasy, and “tangasm”, which is self-explanatory, but she wrote about all of this sitting in cold Edinburgh.

Kunal Basu travelled to China to write The Yellow Emperor’s Cure about a Portuguese man who travels to China in the nineteenth century to find a cure for syphilis.

How many miles clocked between only these three? Is the homeland not enough for the imagination? Can justice be done to a culture if it is visited for a short while and written about? Is it good business?

The sparkling Kassabova had a few wicked answers. She said she was promiscuous in her enjoyment of other languages. She said writers travel for the discomfort of travel. She said writers were perverse creatures. “But in a good way.”

The Rushdie test

The world is divided into two on Rushdie and his visit to India that did not happen and some of those on stage at the meet were taken through the test.

Chetan Bhagat does not think Rushdie did the right thing. Imran Khan did not name names, but said that an action that was painful to a community should be avoided. Outlook editor Vinod Mehta, who regaled the audience with a few strong adjectives used to describe some very-well known personalities, said that though he did not get on well with Rushdie on a number of subjects, and enumerated them, the cancelled visit was a shame. Who pass who fail?

All is well

Moderator Sandip Roy asked Vikram Seth, as he sat beside his mother on the last day of the meet, what he thought of journalist Manu Joseph’s perception that the success of a handful of Indian writers in English has had a corrupting influence — writers are selling Indian exotica to the Western world. The word “corrupt” had a jarring effect on Seth. He did not seem to think that such writing practices were “corrupt”, and seemed to suggest that no writing practices were “corrupt”, for it was legitimate for any writer to try and find a readership. While Joseph has his supporters, Seth was the embodiment of the grace that marks his best writing. A look at Leila Seth, his mother, a lawyer, a high court chief justice, and a writer, revealed where he got it from.

Shadow lines

The meet had opened with Tagore and it closed with Tagore. At a crowded session, titled Taar Chhaya Deergho Hochchhe (His shadow is lengthening, interpreted variously, sometimes ominously, by the speakers) and chaired by Jadavpur University teacher Samantak Das, it was interesting to listen to film director Rituparno Ghosh select his moments from Tagore. He chose a scene from Chokher Bali, a novel he has made into a film. “Songe Binodini ashilo,” he quoted (and Binodini arrived with her). This was true epic style, Rituparno said, like Draupadi arising from the yagna fire, like Sita from the earth. Such moments make you feel the power of Tagore, increasingly obscured by a lack of real contact with his works or bad or no interpretation. The shadow lengthens?

Overheard

But nothing succeeds like success. The pandemonium at the Imran Khan talk on January 30 was a pointer. Chetan Bhagat had the previous day conjured almost as big an audience. As the crowd dispersed after the talk, a young man congratulated his friend on being able to put a question through to Bhagat “Sir”. “It didn’t matter what you asked. So many journalists from so many established papers were present. But you asked him your question. That is how sincerity and hard work pay,” he said.

The Butterfly effect

One is a noted poet, anthologist, literary critic and translator, the other an editor-author who has written a novel that paints a “portrait of young urban Indians”.

When father-son duo Arvind and Palash Krishna Mehrotra (of The Butterfly Generation fame) shared the stage at the Calcutta Literary Meet on Sunday, held in association with The Telegraph, it was to discuss “the writing gene” in a session titled ‘Raising the Butterfly Generation’. Journalist Sandip Roy was in the moderator’s chair.

Father and son delved into the question whether it was the “writing gene” that compelled the latter to become an author. And, if that were the case, how come Palash wrote books like The Butterfly Generation and Eunuch Park — worlds apart from poetry volumes like The Transfiguring Places, which his father is known for?

Palash confessed that growing up in Allahabad, having a private library and a family of writers contributed heavily to his being what he is today.

The freewheeling talk also probed the definition of an “Indian writer”, the pressure of writing an “India” book and English as a written language in the 1960s to the “Rushdie chutnification” of the 1990s, among other things.

“Nothing was taboo in the Sixties. You could say the most outrageous and blasphemous things,” said Mehrotra senior. “I wrote about the Ramayan in such words, and even published them as pamphlets, all at the age of 18.”

For Palash, it is painting the modern urban youth (The Butterfly Generation, if you will), their concerns and way of life, that takes centrestage.

He had the audience in splits when he read out from The Butterfly Generation. “My father’s name is Inu, and he teaches at the inuversity,” he read out the observation of a nursery toddler, the character based on himself.

“At Jaipur, it was something of a tourist spot, where the upper middle-class audience had come to see the tamasha,” Outlook editor Vinod Mehta, who was in the audience, told Metro. “Here, the people might be more humbly dressed, but the meet centres around books wholly.”

Author Anita Nair said: “It’s very focussed here. There is just one session at one time, so you don’t have to rush about to choose.”

The language of broken barriers – Speech babel: writers debate how faithful a good translation should be

Bengali is the most translated of all Indian languages and so it was in the fitness of things that the first edition of the Calcutta Literary Meet, held in association with The Telegraph, have multiple sessions on translation with about half a dozen author-translators attending.

Beyond Babel: Finding Other Literatures Through Translation, the first session on Day 4, saw Pawan K. Varma, Anita Nair, Arunava Sinha and Sampurna Chattarji discuss the significance of translation and the essential qualities of good translation. The session was moderated by Malabika Banerjee of Gameplan, the organisers of the Lit Meet.

Drawing from the Biblical reference, retired diplomat-cum-author-cum-translator Varma said: “The Tower of Babel is a colonial construct. The British were to take away our languages. One of the arguments was that there were too many languages.” India, Varma said, had 24 fully developed languages with well-constructed vocabulary and a fine corpus of literature. “This prompted Macaulay to comment in his Minute on Indian Education ‘You need a ladder to climb out the wall of languages’.”

Varma squarely blamed the British for the way the young generation believed that if one knew English, one could be less than sure in his mother tongue. “This is leading the nation towards becoming a linguistic half caste,” he said. Ruing that translations were greatly neglected, Varma, who has translated Ghalib, Kaifi Azmi, Gulzar and Atal Behari Vajpayee, said: “We are in need of a centre of excellence for translation. In the absence of avenues of good writing in regional languages, the vacuum is often being filled by mediocre English writing.”

But what makes a good translation? “Is it literal translation? But then exactitude is the death of translation,” Sampurna said.

Anita Nair, who has translated Kathakali texts, said: “I wanted to translate Nalacharita, a 19th century Kathakali text, narrating the story of Nala, which is both metaphysical and philosophical. And I decided that I would translate it as I understood it. The author had written it in the fishermen’s dialect and I had to be sure that I retained the flavour.”

Arunava is particular about retaining the author’s voice. “And that is particularly difficult when you are translating different authors. When you move from one author to another, you should be careful that there is no hangover,” he said. Both he and Nair spoke of Jorge Leal Amado de Faria’s writings. “We read him in English but he writes in Portugese and the country flavour is brought into the translated English text,” said Sinha.

Both Varma and Sampurna, who translate poetry, have had the authors of the original works congratulating them that the translation surpasses the original. Varma brushed aside the praise. “Gulzar and Kaifi Azmi are both generous and extremely cultured,” he said, going on to quote Gulzar: “Translation is like a mistress, if she’s beautiful, she’s not faithful and if she’s faithful, she is not beautiful.”

The City Diary

Missing girls return

Two Class IX students of a south Calcutta girls’ school returned home on Tuesday after they went missing on December 20. The duo had fled to Diamond Harbour after failing an exam. The were allegedly kidnapped and taken to Baruipur. The kidnappers later dumped the girls on the Bypass after cops tracked their cellphone signal to the Baruipur hideout.

Nun dead: Pravrajika Amritaprana, 84, a nun of Sri Sarada Math, Dakshineswar, has died on January 2 on the Math premises. She had been suffering from rheumatoid arthritis for the past 10 years.

Clarification: Author Kunal Basu will not be participating in the Apeejay Calcutta Literary Festival 2012 (January 11 to 15). He is scheduled to take part in the Calcutta Literary Meet later in the month (January 26 to 31).

At last, book battle’s bugle call – Eye on Jaipur, a star-studded literary meet at the Book Fair after a literary festival anchored on Park Street

Calcutta may have a decades-old book fair that packs in over 1.5 million visitors, but at the Jaipur Literature Festival, you can spot a dishy Nobel Laureate ambling around with his Booker-winning girlfriend! Well, maybe not Orhan Pamuk or Kiran Desai, but Calcutta will soon get up close with a clutch of authors, actors, musicians and more at not one but two literary events — one on the Book Fair grounds and the other anchored on the city’s most popular street.

From January 26 to 31, the city will hold its first ever Calcutta Literary Meet, bringing into town star authors like Imran Khan, Vikram Seth, Shashi Tharoor, Tahmima Anam, Moni Mohsin, Chetan Bhagat and Amish. They will be joined by a host of prominent city authors, including Sunil Gangopadhyay, Shankar, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay and Amit Chaudhuri. The meet is a part of the 36th International Calcutta Book Fair (January 25 to February 5).

“The idea is to give an interactive edge to the Calcutta Book Fair, which is already the biggest book-related event in India,” said Malavika Banerjee, one of the organisers.

Amit Chaudhuri feels a literary meet under the aegis of the book fair is a “logical extension”. “The Book Fair really celebrates the people’s love for books. But as an author, we’ve sometimes felt the fair is not really a hospitable place for book readings. I guess the Calcutta Literary Meet will provide that platform,” he said.

But first up is the third edition of the Apeejay Calcutta Literary Festival 2012 (January 11-15) that will celebrate a slew of literary events, including 150 years of Rabindranath Tagore and 100 years of Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

“This is what a literary festival should be — not a jamboree but an intimate, in-depth engagement with books and ideas. This is a gift to the culture-loving people of Calcutta,” said Anjum Katyal, an associate director of the Apeejay Calcutta Literary Festival.

Some known faces at the Apeejay do will be authors Kunal Basu, Deborah Baker and Mukul Kesavan, Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s daughter Salima Hashmi and actor Naseeruddin Shah.

The book battlelines have clearly been drawn and bookworms in the city are not complaining. “It’s tempting to go to Jaipur to meet our favourite writers, but it’s not possible for us students. That’s why I am extremely excited to learn about two literary meets being held here this month,” said Waled Aadnan of Presidency University.

But Sougata Mukherjee, publisher, Picador and Pan at Pan Macmillan, wondered if holding back-to-back literary events in the city was such a good idea. “I’m not sure if the dates work. And in between the two lit fests in Calcutta is the big one — Jaipur, between January 20 and 24.”

While many wonder how the Pink City stole Calcutta’s thunder as the book capital of the country, those in the know point out that Jaipur wasn’t built in a day. The planning for the next edition begins almost immediately as one year’s festival ends. “All credit goes to the organisers and also the marketing team. They have been successful in getting a great list of authors,” said Mukherjee.

This year, there is Fatima Bhutto, Kunal Basu, Hari Kunzru, Mark Tully…
“They also have the first-mover advantage,” pointed out Malavika Banerjee of the Calcutta Lit Meet. And, of course, there’s a writer of the stature of William Dalrymple involved, she added.

Jaipur co-director and author Namita Gokhale had earlier told Metro how a year of planning and six months of “obsessive, exhausting work” go into putting up the fest. Add to that a venue called the Diggi Palace and what do you have? The king of literary festivals.

This year, there’s a characteristically late challenger to the crown — Calcutta!
Mukherjee is happy that finally Calcutta has a literary meet worth its words. “The author line-up at the Calcutta Lit Meet is great and it makes a lot of sense to hold it as part of the Book Fair, which is such a huge event; even publishers look forward to it every year.”
Sahitya Akademi award-winning author Chaudhuri, however, hopes that Calcutta offers more to the book lover than just “literary tourism”. “Calcutta has a long history of printing and publishing, children’s writing and so much more. Other places that hold literary festivals — Jaipur or elsewhere — don’t have such a legacy. There the attractions are big authors, filmstars, politicians, sports stars…. Calcutta must offer much more, not just literary tourism.”

For now, bring out those well-worn copies of your favourite books and get ready for some serious autograph-hunting.

Calcutta Literary Meet

What: Calcutta Literary Meet as part of the 36th International Calcutta Book Fair
When: January 26 to 31
Where: Milan Mela Complex
Look out for: Vikram Seth on his much-awaited sequel to A Suitable Boy
Shashi Tharoor on writing, politics and, ahem, Twitter
Amit Chaudhuri on Calcutta, a ‘novel’ city
Imran Khan on ‘captaining’ a nation
Chetan Bhagat on the perks and pressures of writing bestsellers

Apeejay Literary Festival

What: Apeejay Calcutta Literary Festiva
When: January 11-15
Where: Oxford Bookstore, Town Hall and other venues
Look out for: Naseeruddin Shah ) reciting Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poetry in Urdu and English Session by author Deborah Baker Session on writer-director-actor featuring the likes of Sunil Gangopadhyay, Samaresh Majumdar, Kunal Basu , Aparna Sen, Goutam Ghose, Raima Sen and Parambrata Chattopadhyay