The festival will focus on seven regional languages in its debut year – Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil, Oriya, Kannada and Malayalam.
This Valentine’s Day weekend, the city will host a unique literature festival dedicated to regional languages.
The inaugural edition of the Gateway Literary Festival will be held on February 14-15 at the NCPA. “We do not have enough discussion happening on regional literature. Out lit-fests are usually dedicated to English,” says Mohan Kakanadan, executive director of the festival and Editor, CRISIL Ltd. “We are not against English but India has a vibrant regional language writers and we want to highlight that.”
The festival will focus on seven regional languages in its debut year – Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil, Oriya, Kannada and Malayalam. They aim to bring vernacular languages into mainstream literary space. Next year, the plan is to go bigger and rope in languages like Punjabi and Kashmiri.
Kakanadan says they want to test the waters with the more popular Indian languages before moving into lesser known ones like Khasi. “This is the beginning so we wanted to start small. It will not be big show,” he says.
The festival thus is only focused on discussion - there will be no music sessions or workshops.
The themes this year include the relevance of literature in Mumbai, regional language and new technology, and the emerging trends in travelogue writing, script and politics.
The field of translation will be given special attention, especially inter-language translations and the paucity of good translations into English. Some of the eminent speakers at the festival include Pratibha Ray, academic and Oriya fiction writer; the Bengali poet, writer and editor Subodh Sarkar; Benyamin, the novelist and short story writer in Malayalam; Jayanth Pawar, the winner of Sahitya Academy award; and Sachin C Ketkar, the writer, translator and editor whose poems have been translated into Gujarati, Hindi and Telugu.
The sessions include a discussion on Perumal (Murugan) and freedom of expression: the role of the fourth estate in safeguarding literary freedom, Censorship Unplugged where Leena Manimekalai will be in conversation with Govind Nihalani, and Maximum city, Maximum Literature: can the nation’s financial capital also be its literature capital.
The two days will see the release of Makarand Sathe’s book A socio-political history of Marathi theatre and Subodh Sarkar’s poetry collection Fragments from an Indian diary.
“We are not expecting a big turnaround. This is just a small effort to bring together a mix of people from different languages together for an open discussion on their work,” says Kakanadan.
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