In December 2001, India’s first multilingual literary fest was flagged of by prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee from Vigyan Bhawan. The theme was adopted from Tagore’s Ghare Baire ‘at home and the world’ with an aim to attract the Indian diaspora and literary talent across the globe back to India. “Really, if you can have an international film festival, why not a literary one? And who can deny that India’s most internationally known art form today is not films but fiction?” said Himachal Som, director, ICCR who shepherded sixty well known faces of the literary world to Neemrana Fort. Among the authors were Nobel laureate VS Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, Rohinton Mistry, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chitra Divakaruni Banerjee, Anita Desai, late Sunil Gangopadhyay, Shashi Tharoor, Vikram Chandra, Upamanyu Chatterjee, Amit Chaudhuri, Namita Gokhale, and Pico Iyer. Jaipur Lit
Jaipur Lit Fest
Neemrana gave birth to the Jaipur Literary Fest — increasingly a melting pot of global and Indian literature. “The JLF 2014 this year will have a gathering of the greatest artists in fiction and non-fiction the world has to offer, supported by swathes of Princeton, Harvard and Oxbridge faculty,” says festival co-director William Dalrymple. The success of Jaipur has spawned 60 lit fests that are creating a buzz across India, with several cities like Kolkata, Mumbai and Lucknow having two annual literary festivals well attended by authors who are usually their focus. JLF director Namita Gokhale has been actively pursuing new ideas each year that maintain Jaipur’s pioneering image. The Jaipur Lit Fest from 17 to 21 January 2014 adds a new event called Jaipur BookMark that brings together professionals to discuss a range of technology and commercial issues in publishing
Kolkata’s Apeejay Book Fest
The Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival 2014 presents its fifth edition from 8 to 13 January 2014, with signature events celebrating literature, arts and ideas at the magnificent heritage sites of Calcutta, and the iconic Oxford Bookstore that is currently owned and managed by the Apeejay group. The six-day event is the first of two Kolkata lit fests this year. The second event is the third Kolkata Literary Meet to be held during the 38th Kolkata Book Fair organized by Publishers & Booksellers Guild. AKLF will host the launch of Amjad Ali Khan’s My Father, Our Fraternity: The Story of Haafiz Ali Khan and My World followed by a discussion with the musician and celebrated author Amit Chaudhuri. Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s Mirror of Beauty and Sankar’s Thackeray Mansion will be launched by professor Suranjan Das followed by a discussion on the Great Indian Novel moderated by Ashok Vajpayee. Farrukh Dhondy and Upamanyu Chatterjee will be in conversation with Shrabani Basu following the launch of Farrukh Dhondy’s Prophet of Love. Bangla authors Chitrita Banerji, Urmi Rahaman, Nabaneeta Dev Sen and Bedabrata Pain will engage in a discussion moderated by Anchita Ghatak, followed by the launch of Chitrita Banerji’s Mirror City.
Kolkata Literary Meet
Organized by the Publishers & Booksellers Guild, the third edition of the Kolkata Lit Fest, KaLaM 2014 takes place at Victoria Memorial adjacent to the Kolkata Book Fair from 25 to 30 January 2014. Authors Vikram Seth, Ramchandra Guha, Jayant Kripalani, Arunava Sinha, Sugata Bose, Ruchira Gupta, Nilanjana Roy, Anna Chakraborti and film personalities like Sharmila Tagore, Javed Akhtar, Shabana Azmi, Naseeruddin Khan and Zoya Akhtar will take part. International speakers include Gloria Steinem, Adrian Levy, David and Peter Gordon.
Delhi Lit Fest
This small but centrally located event from 7 to 9 February 2014 will be held at the Indira Gandhi National Council of Arts at Janpath, a week ahead of the World Book Fair. Sanjoy Roy, one of the the organizers of JLF once said that it is impossible to get government permission for a decent lit fest at Delhi. The Delhi Lit Fest organizers have cleverly chosen the IGNCA as the venue, kept it small and made it a government sponsored show with UPA heavyweights Sheila Dixit, Kapil Sibal and Sashi Tharoor all gracing the occasion.
The Hindu Lit Fest
The literary fest started by The Hindu in 2010 in Chennai and Delhi will be back in 2014. The Chennai edition will span three days from 11 to 13 January 2014 at Sir Mutha Venkatasubbarao Hall, Lady Andal School, Harrington Road, Chetpet. Delhi will hold a day-long festival on 8 February 2014 at the Siri Fort Auditorium Complex. Among the authors scheduled to take part are Lakshmi Holmstrolm, Madhuri Bannerjee, Nikhila Kesavan, Neelam Mansingh, PC Ramakrishnan, Kumar Sahani and Nandini Krishnan.
Sahitya Sammelans
Many Indian literature festivals started years before independence. The 86th chapter of the Akhil Bharatiya Marathi Sahitya Sammelan, the annual all-India Marathi literary meet, will be held in Chiplun from 11 to 13 January 2014, while the fourth chapter of the Vishwa Marathi Sahitya Sammelan, the global Marathi literary meet, will be held in Toronto on 1 and 2 September this year. Seventy-six year old Kannada novelist Norbert D’Souza, popularly known as Na D’Souza, has been selected to preside over the 80th All India Kannada Sahitya Sammelana to be held in Madikeri from 7 to 9 January 2014. Well known for his novels, plays, children’s books and short stories, D’Souza has contributed immensely to Kannada literature for the last three decades. A four-day literature festival ‘Katha Prasang’ will be organized at the Vagarth centre of Hindi poetry and literature, Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal during March 2014.
