With the spirit of preserving language and culture, Sahityakala Parishad’s annual “Festival of letters”, a five-day long fest, began on February 21 and culminated on February 26. The theme and focus of the 2017 Sahityotsava was ‘Folk and Oral literature’. The Exhibition was inaugurated by the distinguished Sanskrit Scholar, Prof Satyavrat Shastri, who talked about the greatness of Indian literature. Each day of the festival ended with a folk performance.
An award ceremony for presenting the Sahitya Akademi awards for 2016 was held at the Kamani auditorium on February 22 as a part of the festival. A total of 24 awards were presented to writers, writing in various languages. Dr Jayant Vishnu Narlikar, a well-known Marathi writer and a distinguished physicist, was the chief guest. Dr Narlikar said that though he did not have depth of literary knowledge, he could still say that that the effects of science can be best described only through literature and only by litterateurs. He observed that the present-day technology filled societies should try and preserve literature of the time, as it is literature that reflects the values and culture of the society and not technology.
The third day of the festival witnessed a young writers’ meet and the annual Samvastar lecture for 2017, which was presented by Dr Ramchandra Guha. He talked about Indians, especially Indian historians shying away from writing a historical biography and also about the art of writing a biography. He gave away several reasons for such a choice of not writing a biography as it comes with a burden of religious and scholarly inheritance. Moreover, history’s own inclination towards social sciences over literature becomes a cause of such a choice. Another reason why historical biographies never took off in our country according to him is the author’s need to suppress one’s ego in order to write about another individual’s ego.
Dr Guha then talked about his first biographical work which was on the life of Verrier Elwin, anthropologist and tribal activist. This challenging work of his had changed his literary outlook, and made him realise the importance of secondary characters in such a biographical work.
The Akademi organised a National seminar on the topic, Folklore: Telling’s and Retellings, for the final three days of the festival. Dr K Sreenivasarao, the Secretary of the Akademi, welcomed all the participants on the first day of the seminar and spoke about the importance of folklore in preserving the culture and tradition. In his inaugural address, Professor Manoj Das, eminent writer and Fellow, Sahitya Akademi, stated that while folklore occupies the largest area of literature, it still becomes difficult to separate folktales from myths. Professor Tabish Khair, an eminent English writer was the guest of honour. He stated that stories are the most common, most pervasive and the oldest way of expressing human thoughts where human beings can live as well.
A Tribal Writers’ meet was held on the second last day of the festival. Writers writing in ancient and rare languages as well as languages from the hills of Meghalaya in the North East were present in the meet. Several myths were retold in the session, with the linkage of nature to the Creation myths. Kharia, Kurux and Santali were among the few Creation myths which were demystified in the session. Poetry in seventeen different tribal languages was also recited by seventeen poets, marking the end of the second session.
The festival came to an end with another daylong seminar being held, on the topic Translation as Retelling. The focus of the seminar was on the importance of preserving the Indian tradition of Retelling stories (Anuvad) in different tongues which is very different from the western way of translation of texts. Dr Vishwanath Prasad Tiwari, President, Sahitya Akademi, stated that India’s translation tradition precedes that of European literature with Ramkatha and Mahabharata being translated way before in almost all languages of the country. Dr Sumayu Tripathi, an eminent English scholar, said that translators were re-creators and extremely important for a literary tradition.
The week-long Festival of letters thus ended on a hopeful note, for the literary cultures and traditions of India.