A Lit-fest Divided Equally Between Malayalam and English

A multiplicity of voices and curious, well-read audiences made all the difference leading to spirited conversations at the ninth edition of the Kerala Literature Festival (KLF).

Sunita Williams’ tent Ezhuthola had the most footfall on the first day with the just-retired Nasa astronaut expressing feelings of gratitude for being adopted as “India’s daughter” and describing her friendship with her workplace senior Kalpana Chawla who would typically point out coastlines and patches of trees to her while out together in space. “Don’t you want to go home?” Williams would ask Chawla to which “yes, but don’t you want to see all this?” was what she would poignantly say.

Devdutt Pattanaik, Sam Dalrymple, Rana Dasgupta, Ruchir Joshi, Volga and Rahul Bhattacharya were among talking heads who inspired and entertained this writer on the second day of the fest. Rana Dasgupta proposed a universal digital register of citizens who can vote in all important elections around the world. The novelist Salman Rushdie delivered a very enjoyable talk albeit via video-call in the evening wherein he said: “The memoir [Knife] just happened out of something that happened to me and needed to be dealt with, but my day job is a novelist.”

At 2.30pm on the dot, the sky above the festival became crowded by wings of kites. Flapping, swooping, circling: it was an awe-inspiring moment. Upon enquiry, one learned that Kozhikode gentleman Azeem regularly feeds them nearby at this hour. Shashi Tharoor arrived by boat on the third day of the beach fest. He laid out a robust defence of the Indian Constitution as a living, breathing, document, while quoting Ambedkar to add that a lot also depends on those that operate it. While hoping that the Supreme Court would soon come up with a timeframe for governors to sign bills, he also laid it at the door of the court to decide the question of whether they were needed at all to perform the role of ceremonial heads of individual states. 

Malayalam writers M. Mukundan, Paul Zachariah, Benyamin, K.R. Meera, S. Hareesh and others held the attention of rapt audiences.  One could not help wishing for an interpreter/interlocutor as in the case of Japanese writer Satoshi Yagisawa who managed to charm readers with help of language trainer Lynette Dias. Globally renowned figures Nobel Laureates Abhijit Banerjee and Abdulrazak  Gurnah, and Booker Prize winners Kiran Desai and Banu Mushtaq wowed everyone while scholars Peggy Mohan and Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee made listeners look at matters from a new angle.

Sportsmen Ben Johnson and Rohan Bopanna spoke about their journeys. Brisk conversations continued, too, at the German Pavilion where puppetry, coffee and pancake making workshops also took place. Ghatam player Sumana Chandrashekar regaled all with an extraordinary performance on her instrument.

There were plenty of other trending conversations, too, on polyamory, for instance, by Arundhati Ghosh while Gen Z writers Anurag Verma, Aishwarya Gopinath and Sanjana Ramachandran unpacked various issues for young people.

Gurnah’s Theft and Sanjoy K. Roy’s There’s a Ghost in My Room were among books launched. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales spoke about the 25-year journey of his project that started off as Nupedia and evolved into a website that is edited about 5.7 times every second. His session was the one that grappled with the consequences of AI, one of which was that more books are being printed today but fewer and fewer people are reading them. Then there is the question of copyright, wherein Wales explained to audiences how ChatGPT is given to trawling Wikipedia and presenting the information it found therein without attribution. It was in many ways a sobering picture to contemplate.

What is it about the Kerala Literature Festival that makes it stand apart from other lit fests in India? Asked this question, CEO of organiser DC Books, Ravi Deecee, said: “It is a people-driven festival. The curation is such that it does not focus too heavily on books; it looks at other areas of life, too, like health and science, which find a place of prominence.” He also said, with its focus on Malayalam (“there are about 300 sessions, 150 each in English and Malayalam”), how KLF is “really the size of two lit fests”. What are his plans for next year? Ravi says he plans to further expand the festival since it will be its 10th anniversary for which programming will be a challenge. But he looks forward to it.