Small is beautiful too
Being in Kolkata always makes my heart sing, and the Kolkata Literary Meet (KLM), held from March 22 to 27, made me fall for the city yet again. The festival was tiny in scale compared to the behemoths organised in other parts of India but that did not matter because it was all heart. There was an intimacy between writers and readers rarely seen in places where fanfare is the order of the day. Bigger is not always better.
KLM, or Kalam as the organisers call it, was inaugurated by poet-lyricist-screenwriter Javed Akhtar, whose verse has been translated into Bangla by Srijato. Apart from holding forth on his own poetry and the fate of Urdu in the current political scenario, Akhtar entertained the audience with stories about his deceased friend, poet Sahir Ludhianvi.
Akhtar sensed that listeners were eager to hear about the man’s relationships with novelist Amrita Pritam and playback singer Sudha Malhotra and said: “There was only one woman in Sahir’s life. That was his mother. He was an atheist, but he worshipped his mother. It was a highly unusual relationship.” This mother fixation was by no means a startling revelation; authors Surinder Deol and Khushwant Singh have mentioned it in the past.
Cyrus Broacha managed to elicit much laughter. While the comedian did not plug his books, Karl Aaj Aur Kal (2010) and The Average Indian Male (2011), he joked about being mistaken for Bollywood singer Shreya Ghoshal at an airport, and about a call from former Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray. Apparently, Thackeray was a fan of the Broacha show MTV Bakra. Journalist and author Hussain Zaidi also made the audience laugh when he spoke about a phone call with gangster Dawood Ibrahim. He recalled being stunned to hear Dawood speak in polite, refined Urdu quite unlike the taporispeak of gangsters in Hindi films. Usha Uthup, who lives in Kolkata, was there to speak about her biography, written by Vikas Kumar Jha and translated into English as Queen of Pop: The Autobiography of Usha Uthup, by Srishti Jha.
Other authors at Kalam included Ghazala Wahab, Manu Pillai, Mridula Ramesh, Sandip Roy, Arunava Sinha, Tony Joseph, Rahul Bhattacharya, Amish Tripathi, Anita Agnihotri, Jeet Thayil, Rakesh Khanna and Bachi Karkaria. They covered a diverse range of subjects from ghosts to translation and minority rights.
The festival venue was the fantastic Victoria Memorial, known for its gardens and galleries, Indo-Saracenic architecture, and its spectacular collection of artefacts. Nostalgia is part of Kolkata’s DNA, so it was hardly surprising that there were multiple sessions celebrating its history and heritage.
Kalam also aimed to expand the concept of “literary” by offering a platform to forms of creative expression beyond books — illustration, stand-up comedy, music and film.
The best part of Kalam was Simi Garewal’s session on the final day. She had audiences hanging on to every word when she spoke about working with Satyajit Ray in Aranyer Din Ratri (1970), based on Sunil Gangopadhyay’s novel of the same name. A huge fan, she recalls being unable to bring herself to say hello when she saw Ray at a party thrown by Raj Kapoor. Ray, however, was convinced that she would be perfect to play a tribal woman in his film. They later bonded over word games and wrote letters to each other. Garewal plans to donate these letters to an archive.
There were many sessions in Bangla and it was heart-warming to see the language given pride of place at the festival. So it was ironic that Ajoy Bose’s documentary based on his book Across the Universe: The Beatles in India (2018) was screened at the Bengal Club. The entrance to this venue bears a plaque stating: “In the house which formerly stood on this site and was dismantled in 1908, resided Thomas Babington Macaulay, law member of the Supreme Council 1834-38.”
Macaulay once famously said that “a single shelf at a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” Thankfully, Indians are getting over their colonial hangover and now find that sort of statement more comic than true.