First literary festival rich on culture and heritage
The ongoing Brahmaputra literary Festival (BlF) in Guwahati is certainly a grand occasion for the people of North-East to celebrate. It is for the first time that such a festival has been organised in this part of the country. With this, the region has also joined the league of glamours literary festivals held across the country. The three-day festival is going to focus not only on languages, literatures, cultures, society, politics, performance traditions, music, identity, media of the region, but also on national and international aspects as well. This being the vast literary festival of Assam and also for other States in the North-East, will offer an opportunity to the growing number of authors, intellectuals and journalists to showcase their talents at a new intellectual exchange platform each year. With a hope to bring forth a fresh literary aroma from the North-East people to the mainstream of the country, the director of the National Book Trust (NBT) and Sahitya Akademi Award winning Assamese author Rita Choudhury said, “We have aimed to make the festival a landmark event of the country's literary calendar, which will not only expose people to interact with famed litterateurs, but also take literature of the northeast to the rest of the country and the world”. This indicates how a literary festival like this can both be vehicles of change and connectivity in a vast country like ours. Indeed, the very name of the event, which is kept after a mighty river in the State, will remain a source of congregation, unity and festivity for the common people.
As Brahmaputra has an age-old tradition of spreading both its fertility and fury equally throughout the State of Assam, the BlF must symbolise and take it forward now in terms of exposing the rich reservoirs of the literary and cultural dynamics of the region. There should have been a literary festival in the North-East long before. Still many of our own countrymen are hardly aware about the people, culture and their long-drawn historical traditions through which they are intimately connected to the mainland since time immemorial. Therefore, the BlF must rediscover the literary and cultural extravaganza of these States. Also, it could be made into a common platform to expose the massive writings available in regional languages and in tribal dialects, by connecting the local vernacular literary bodies of some of the States like Assam, Manipur, Tripura etc. As the festival is jointly organised by the NBT and the Government of Assam, this will provide an added opportunity for it to easily move into as a national event. Besides being an annual feature of the country's literary calendar, the BlF will help to channelise new ideas and their dissemination simultaneously. Apart from the participation of the prominent regional, national and international authors, the coming of celebrities, will add glamour to the first of such an event in Assam. This festival will be another feather in the cap for the city, the nerve centre of the region.