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| Edited By: Gargi Gupta |Source: DNA |Updated: Jun 03, 2018, 08:10 AM IST
ZeeJLF@The British Library, the London chapter of Jaipur's famed literature festival, will be back for its fifth showing this weekend. The three-day affair, held across three venues at the Library, will see the participation of several well-known writers, ports, politicians, journalists, scholars, historians – and even a female Tibetan monk. In discussion, will be books and issues of topical interest, issues of relevance to Britain, India, the knotted history of Indo-British relations, as well other issues of wider, global concern. Some highlights of the festival:
Katherine Butler Schofield is an ethnographer who teaches at King's College London and will be out this year with what promises to be a very fascinating tome – Monsoon Feelings: History of Emotions in the Rain. The history of music and dance in late Mughal times is her area of research and the subject of this conversation will – how far is music ever truly captured in writing? – should be interesting.
It's a 100 years since women were allowed to vote, and discussing this landmark in the history of democracy is a panel comprising Anita Anand, biographer of Sophia Dalip Singh, daughter of deposed Sikh ruler Dalip Singh and a committed Suffragette; Angela Saini, the author of a book on women in science; Baroness Helena Kennedy, Labour member of the House of Lords of the United Kingdom and author; and Bee Rowlatt, whose last book was on Mary Wollstonecraft – the pioneering exponent of women's rights.
Star couple, Shabana Azmi and Javed Akhtar, speak about their fathers – Kaifi Azmi and Jan Nisar Akhtar, respectively, both legendary poets.
Three Burma experts speak on the Rohingya crisis. They are – Azeem Ibrahim, the author of a recent book on the subject; Adrian Levy, whose 2001 book on Burma's jade mines got him blacklisted from the country; and Wendy Law-Yone, memoirist and novelist of Burmese origin who fled the country when the junta seized power in 1962.
John Zubrzycki, Sydney-based author and researcher, discusses his upcoming book, Empire of Enchantment – the history of Indian magic, drawing on ancient religious texts, travellers' accounts and the narratives of jugglers, yogis and fakirs.
Music has always been an integral part of the ZeeJLF programming. Rounding off this edition is a unique workshop-performance by Somjit Dasgupta, disciple of maestro Radhika Mohan Maitra, who traces the journey of the sarod from Afghanistan across the Himalayas to Bengal and Assam.
The British brought the railways to India to further their own colonial interests, little imagining the transformative effect it would have on the subcontinent by helping to bring closer its vast geographies and giving a fillip to the nationalist movement. Monisha Rajesh, author of a recent book called Around India in 80 Trains will be part of a panel and discuss this with Christian Wolmar, well-known British transport historian, and man-for-all-debates Shashi Tharoor.
Preti Taneja's debut novel, an adaptation of King Lear set in Delhi called We That Are Young, which was praised everywhere, has made it to the long list of the
Desmond Elliott Prize – UK's most prestigious prize for debut novelists. Her fellow panellist, Anuradha Roy, is fairly well established, her last novel making it to the Man Booker-long list.
Marina Warner is the author of the Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights (2012), a much lauded scholarly work on the way the Arabian Nights have shaped our imagination, while Paulo Lemos Horta has written on the cultural and literary history of the Arabian Nights and the travellers, translators and storytellers who took it to the world in Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights. Together they speak of the stories and the stories behind the stories.
