BLF 2019
The three-day festival with three parallel sessions each day, a cultural-spiritual immersion program in the morning and a cultural program in the evening attracted about 70 authors, discussants and artists from across India and abroad and hundreds of cognoscenti from Bhopal and its environs, particularly college going students and teachers.
The Literary Festival was a buzzing cornucopia of Padma Shri and National awardees. While all 56 sessions were curated thoughtfully some of the popular and more notable authors and discussants who attended this literary and artistic extravaganza were: environmentalists Pradeep Krishen, Bittu Sahgal, Pranay Lal and Vivek Menon; diplomat/civil servants Pavan Varma, TCA Raghavan, Rajiv Mehrishi, Amitabh Kant, Anthony de Sa, Rajni Sekhri Sibal and SY Quraishi; military, intelligence and diplomacy experts General Ata Hasnain, General Mohinder Puri, Shiv Kunal Verma and AS Dulat (an international expert on South Asai, Professor Barnett Rubin came all the way from the United States to listen to the discussions); social commentators Keki Daruwalla, Bachi Karkaria, Vinita Dawra Nangia, Anil Dharker, Seema Goswami, Vinita Bakshi, Ashali Verma and Koral Dasgupta; historians/mythologists Shonaleeka Kaul, Ashali Verma, KK Chakravarty, Rima Hooja, Christopher Doyle; researcher/scholars like Madhavi Menon who is an authority on human behavior and sexuality, Radhakrishan Pillai who has written extensively on the learnings from Chanakya, Babli Moitra Saraf who has written literature keeping children in mind, Santosh Mehrotra Professor of Economics in JNU, Ila Pattnaik Professor in NIFP, Simran Chadha who has analysed the conversion of literature into cinema; management experts like Sachit Jain, Ashwini Lohani, V Kumaraswamy and Animesh Parihar; art scholars and artists like Manish Pushkale, Akhilesh, Bhajju Shyam, Jyotindra Jain, Alka Pande, Anubhav Nath, Tara Douglas, Gita Wolf, Vivek Tembe, John Bowles, Erwin and Christine Neumeyer; Hindi poets and writers like Udayan Vajpeyi, Ashok Chakradhar, Nandkishore Acharya, Arun Kamal, Ratan Thiyam, Ramesh Chandra Shah, Santosh Chaubey, Purushottam Agarwal. There were sessions on food and fitness as well with the noted architect Sunita Kohli talking about her book on Awadhi Cuisine, Kavita Devgan discussing from her book Ultimate Grandmother Hacks and Meera Dass narrating the discovery of Neematnama a fifteenth century recipe book from Malwa, which travelled from Mandu to Tipu Sultan’s court in the seventeenth century.
There was also involvement of young and old civil servants and writers: Hariranjan Rao, Pallavi Govil, Tejaswi Naik, Sufiyah Quraishi, SC Behar and R Parasuram and most importantly of civil servant wives: Seema Raizada, Suchita Malik, Preeti Chandra and Atima Mankotia.
What distinguished this literature and art event from others of this ilk was its unremitting conformity to literature and art. Notably, it discussed cinema without depending on film stars to give it glamour.
The Literature Festival saw multiple book launches, varied art exhibitions and Cultural Programs. The key exhibition was on tribal art, centered around the works of the noted tribal artist Bhajju Shyam, a Padma Shri awardee who has exhibited his art all over the world and is one of the leading exponents of the Pradhan Gond art movement. These works, assembled thanks to the efforts of Gita Wolf publisher, Tara Douglas animator and Anubhav Nath art collector were truly mesmerizing. These included paintings that had led to the publishing of the famous London Jungle Book when, in 2002, Bhajju Shyam had gone to London on an invitation to do the murals of a restaurant in London’s fashionable Islington district. Amongst those who advised about curating this exhibition were Meera Dass and John Bowles, a former Professor of art in the United States and now a prominent art collector.
An artist Nicola Strippoli (he was nicknamed Tarshito by Acharya Rajnish, meaning 'thirst for inner knowledge') from Bari in Italy carried a 10-meter-long canvas with himself, half-completed in Italy and completed it on the site in Bharat Bhawan with the help of several Gond tribal painters. The central message was "A sense of peace and union between India, Italy and all the nations of the world as art unites people."
A discourse on prehistoric rock art of India by Austrian experts Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger helped the audience to understand the inscriptions at the famous UNESCO heritage site of Bhimbhedka near Bhopal.
Amongst the book launches were the following:
- Wild Madhya Pradesh by Bittu Sahgal
- A Conjurer’s Archive by Jyotindra Jain
- The Last Ball Six by Dr Pradeep Kapoor
- A paperback edition of The Undocumented Wonder by SY Quraishi
- Bhopal by Joe Alvarez and Sushil Prakash
The three-day festival began with an invocation of Goddess Saraswati by the famous Dhrupad singers, the Gundecha Bandhu. It also included a retrospective of songs from Hindi cinema spanning the life and work of OP Nayar presented by the husband wife couple Ajay and Atima Mankotia. The second day started with a philosophical, though pithy, discourse on Achieving Happiness by Geshe Dorji Damdul, the Director of the Tibet House and ended with a musical evening curated by reputed jazz singer Joe Alvarez and his daughter Shefali Alvarez. The third day ended with a local band called Upswing, comprising of enthusiastic youngsters from Bhopal. The festival was inaugurated by the Union Tourism Minister Alphons Kannanthanan in the presence of dignitaries like the State Minister for Culture Vijaylakshmi Sadho and Member of Parliament Pavan Varma. The valedictory on the third evening was conducted in the presence of the State Minister for Public Relations Shri PC Sharma in the presence of participating authors like SY Quraishi, KK Chakravarty, Ratan Thiyam and Dr Santosh Chaubey. All the citizens of Bhopal who attended the festival appeared unanimous in their acclaim that this festival should become an annual feature. The general feeling and perception was that this event not only pleased their cultural sensibilities, but, for once they also felt intellectually provoked, stimulated and energized. The print media and electronic media welcomed the festival with great enthusiasm and paid it deserved attention. The fragrance of this provocative and enticing event will resonate wide and far for a long time to come.
