Literary festival gets a novel spin

Subuhi Jiwani previews Kitab, where writers, publishers and media will celebrate the world of words.

 

To call Pablo Ganguli ambitious would be an understatement. After all, he is a 22-year-old who wants to develop India’s biggest literary festival, discover its wackiest minds and lead the country into a new age of books and reading, publishing and writing.

 

The Kolkata-born Ganguli, who divides his time between Morocco and Britain, is the director of Kitab: UK-Indian Literary Festival, a gathering of writers, publishers and media people, mostly from India and Britain, which will unfold in New Delhi from April 7 to 9.

 

“People tend to think that writing takes place in elitist circles,” says the man with the new literary plan. “It’s not a book fair or a convention, and neither is it just a festival of literature. It a celebration of people who think and who write - not just people who write books. It is about anybody who puts pen to paper.” Left out from this literary celebration, intentionally says Ganguli, are heavyweights such as Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie. “The giants need to make space for other writers.”

 

Among those who do not qualify for exclusion are Amit Chaudhuri, Suketu Mehta, Gita Hariharan and Sunil Gangopadhyay, the sole regional language writer at the festival. Also in attendance will be Rana Dasgupta (Tokyo Cancelled), Rajorshi Chakraborti (Or the Day Seizes You), and CP Surendran, whose An Iron Harvest will be launched at the festival.

 

The British line-up includes outspoken Labour MP Clare Short, who resigned as a minister in Tony Blair’s government over the Iraq war and wrote about it in An Honourable Deception?: New Labour, Iraq, and the Misuse of Power, and the India-settled Scottish writer and historian William Dalrymple, who will read from his forthcoming book, The Last Mughal, which tells the story of Bahadur Shah Zafar and the collapse of the Mughal empire.

 

Also present will be London-based writer Nadeem Aslam, whose second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers, made it to the Booker longlist in 2004. Star power will be provided by Goldie Hawn, who will read from her candid and insightful memoir, A Lotus Grows in the Mud (2005).

 

A panel discussion on women’s writing will be a prominent part of the festival. Says panel participant Malavika

 

Sangghvi, Kitab’s vice president for India (also lifestyle and travel editor for this paper), “Most women’s writing is sensual; it has to do much more with matters of the heart. But women writers in India today are speaking in a modern, grown-up and unsentimental voice,” she says.

 

This is one of a gamut of issues other than writing that Kitab plans to cover, among them book publishing, how media respond to literature, and new trends in South Asian non-fiction and reportage. Unfortunately, Kitab will not be making time or space for that neglected child of Indian literature, poetry.

 

Ganguli hopes that the festival will deliver fresh perspectives on Indo-Anglican writing. “Indian writers know that if they write about a rich and colourful India, their books will sell in Britain. My aim is to create a melting pot of ideas so we can have books published about Indians who have a lifestyle that isn’t Indian,” he says.