NO BOOK LEFT BEHIND
With the sprouting of several niche lit fests, no theme is now too small and no interest too insignificant
In mid-December, Gaur Gopal Das, an engineer-turned-lifestyle-coach, dressed in saffron robes, addressed a packed house at the sprawling, historic trading floor of the Bombay Stock Exchange building. One of the first speakers at the Dalal Street Lit Fest Exchange (and author of Life’s Amazing Secrets), Das was thronged after his talk by students and professionals alike.
The stock exchange might seem an unlikely venue for a lit fest, but now in its third edition, the two-day event focused on finance and literature has come into its own. “How do we bring people together and create a forum for exchanging thoughts and sharing ideas freely?” asks Ambarish Datta, managing director of the BSE Institute, which runs the event. “It started as an experiment. But at the end of the day, the goal is to demystify and bring [our work] closer to the people.”
This is just one of several niche lit fests in India today, smaller in scale and scope than a traditional lit fest, but focused in its themes. “Other festivals at Jaipur, Mumbai, Delhi, they are more fiction focused,” says Benedict Parmanand, founder and curator director of the five-year-old Bangalore Business Literature Festival. “I am a firm believer that business reading and writing have come of age and are not represented in these festivals.”
While the Jaipur Literature Festival is India’s biggest, bestattended festival, others like Tata Literature Live and the Times Literature Festival are prominent annual events. But a slew of niche lit fests catering to overlooked authors or underappreciated genres are making inroads into India’s festival calendar. The Ekamra Sports Literature Festival had its second edition this year, the
Military Literature Festival in Chandigarh just concluded and the Rainbow Literature Festival with a queer focus had its inaugural edition in Delhi this month. There are also business lit fests in Pune and Bengaluru, the Tribal Literature festival in Bhopal and poetry festivals in Bengaluru and Delhi, to name a few. A part of the impetus for these new festivals stems from a desire to carve out a distinct space for a particular genre or set of voices. For instance, Sharif D. Rangnekar, director of the Rainbow festival says, “We wanted to hold the mike ourselves, as the queer community, without being a token at other litfests.” Sundeep Misra, a sports journalist and head of Emerging Sports, which organises the Ekamra festival, takes a similar line. “My point was, sports literature is also literature, why not have a separate festival for it?” he says. As publishing has boomed in India, the efflorescence of new festivals is perhaps a natural outcome. These aren’t, however, restricted to author talks or panel discussions, but are more broadly focused on ideas, current events and networking opportunities. At Ekamra, the focus is also on authors “who wouldn’t get a place elsewhere”, says Misra. And at the Bangalore Business Literature Festival, there are workshops in a relaxed, convivial atmosphere. “We didn’t want a conference-like experience,” says Parmanand.