SPEEDING UP, GOING YOUNG, WRITING A NEW CHAPTER
About two months before the Supreme Court decriminalised homosexual acts between consenting adults, one 64-year-old institution was already taking brave steps to celebrate the contributions of India’s queer community.
On July 17, the Sahitya Akademi organised a literary meet in Kolkata, exclusively featuring LGBTQ writers and poets. The event was anchored by a transgender woman, included five authors and was so popular that the venue ran out of space.
The Akademi, India’s central institution for literary dialogue, publication and promotion, hasn’t had a particularly risktaking history. Though set up by the government, it functions autonomously, hosting seminars, lectures, translation workshops and awarding grants for authors’ research and travel.
Over the last three years, a quiet, determined transformation has been in the works. The Akademi opened its first bookstore outside its New Delhi headquarters — at a Metro station. It launched an initiative to take literature to rural pockets. And it’s creating digital records of tribal language translations in English and Hindi.
RAINBOW MOVES
Subodh Sarkar, a Sahitya Akademi awardwinning poet and the convener of the Akademi’s Bengali Advisory Board, says Kolkata’s LGBTQ meet almost worked like a prelude to the Supreme Court ruling. He found Manabi Bandopadhyay, India’s first transgender college principal and vicechairperson of West Bengal Transgender Development Board, to be the “obvious choice” for an anchor. For 25 years, Bandopadhyay has also produced a Bengali transgender-themed magazine, so she says she was “familiar with the literary works of the LGBTQ community”.
The event featured the voices of poets like Rani Majumder and Prosphutita Sugandha, who read their works on themes of identity, repressed desire and rejection.
Sarkar wasn’t prepared for the response. The venue was packed with LGBTQ authors. One group of Kolkata transgenders gatecrashed — insisting on performing their own songs .
“They mistakenly thought that if you turned up with any writing, the government would pay you,” explains Bandopadhyay. “We had to explain that the only money involved was an honorarium offered to participating authors. But they came hoping to get their voices heard, so we let them perform. I don’t think they’d ever been before such a large audience.”
RIGHT ON TRACK
In 2015, the Akademi broke free of its Ferozeshah Road office in Delhi to open its first bookstore at the Kashmere Gate and then at Vishwavidyalaya Metro station. The stores, called Metro Reading Rooms, are a treasure trove of books in Bengali, Dogri, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kashmiri, Maithili, Odia, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil, Urdu and more. The institution plans to open bookstores at three more stations — Rajiv Chowk, Noida and Gurugram.
“Sahitya Akademi bookshops at New Delhi Metro stations are part of long-term strategy of targeting readers in cities,” says Akademi secretary K Sreenivasa Rao. “We want to promote better reading habits among commuters especially adolescents. We are also keen on creating small libraries along with the bookstores and have requested the Metro for approval.”
Away from the Metro and metros, is the village outreach programme Gramalok, which has been identifying hidden literary talent in 150 villages. One of their discoveries is 14-year-old Sri Anthakarana from Shivamogga in Karnataka. Anthakarana has been writing since he was nine and has published 25 books — novels, poetry, short stories. “He conducted a writing workshop with students, inspiring them to be more expressive,” says Sri Sarjashankar Hiremath, Anthakarana’s father.
CHANGE IS CONSTANT
Much of the Akademi’s changes are aimed at making the institution relevant to a younger demographic and reflect India’s evolving literary focus, says Rao. “Organisations that produce literature of any kind, be it prose or poetry, have to evolve with their readers,” he says.
For a 64-year-old institution with a focus on documenting tribal and oral literature, this is no easy task. “The challenge is to link such literature with the nearest mainstream language. Only then can we think of video and audio clips and podcasts.”
Since 2017, they have published English and Hindi translations of many tribal songs, epic poems and folktales on CD. “It’s never too late,” says Anil Dharker, writer and director of the Mumbai International Literary Festival. “All this time, Sahitya Akademi has been seen as a musty, slow, quasi-government organisation. Now they are actively looking for young people and going to unexplored areas,” he says. “It’s a welcome departure from playing safe.”