Report: The Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival

With sessions on patriarchy, the Lok Sabha elections, Rashbehari Bose, and mythology, the festival ensured that the audience was kept engaged throughout

The sixteenth edition of Oxford bookstore’s Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival was held from 10th to 12th January, 2025. Unlike other literature festivals where sessions are held at hotels or in similarly controlled environments, the AKLF was conducted at Allen Park on busy Park Street with sessions taking place even as the city swirled smoothly around participants.

Vikas Jha, Nusrat F Jafri, Preeti Gill, Samrat Choudhury and Jael Silliman at the Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival (Courtesy AKLF)

At the inauguration, Usha Uthup, the queen of disco, spoke about her long association with the event before singing a few songs. This was followed by the launch of Arjun Sengupta’s book, Shyam Benegal: Film Maker of the Real India.

Shabnam Minwalla, Rupleena Bose, Jashodhara Chakravarti and Anisha Lalvani at AKLF (Courtesy AKLF)

The festival’s first session had model and fitness influencer Milind Soman and his wife Ankita Konwar talking to program head Neeta Sreedharan about Keep Moving, the book they authored with Soman’s mother, Usha. The couple spoke about their fitness journeys and how running became a part of their lives. Soman also spoke about his struggle with overcoming addiction.

At a session titled Photographs and Memories, Sarmistha Dutta Gupta, author, Jallianwala Bagh said she focused on narratives that had been rendered invisible in our literature and in our collective memory. Brinda Crishna spoke about the life of her paternal grandmother, the subject of her book, In Search of Shobha, who started a women’s school in Kanpur in pre-independent India and the lengths to which she went to bring in students. Author Tapti Roy spoke about migrations finding a prominent place in her work.

Another interesting session had several translators discussing their craft, its do’s and don’ts. V Ramaswamy spoke about being a Tamilian who translates Bangla literature into English and why the work of Subimal Misra particularly resonated with him. Assamese translator Navamalati Neog Chakraborty revealed that she came to translation when she was urged by others to translate her father Maheswar Neog’s book. Meanwhile, Anjana Basu was made to translate Rituparno Ghosh’s scripts and subtitles once the latter realized that she always mentally translated whatever she heard in Bangla into English! Arunava Sinha stated that he focuses on whatever work he thinks deserves a wider audience.

Devasis Chattopadhyay, author, Harry Hobbs of Kolkata and Other Forgotten Lives, and Sreemati Mukherjee, author, Women and the Romance of the Word, spoke to Husna-Tara Prakash about their books set in 19th century Calcutta. Chattopadhyay maintained that the city had been cosmopolitan for a long time while Mukherjee spoke about her journey as an academic leading her to write about the women of an earlier era. The crowd got especially dense as William Dalrymple and Rana Safvi spoke about his latest book, The Golden Road.

At the start of day two, Aparna Vaidik and Prasun Roy, in a conversation moderated by Sudeep Chakravarti, spoke about the lives of certain Indian freedom fighters and revolutionaries. Vaidik spoke about the archaic laws of the British that focused on making the process the punishment and added that unfortunately, the same template exists today. Roy spoke about his attempt to rejig our collective memories to include Rashbehari Bose.

Nikhil Katyal, Nusrat F Jafri, Paromita Chakravarti, Neha Dixit and Sandip Roy at AKLF (Courtesy AKLF)

Next, Ruchir Joshi talked to festival director Anjum Katyal about his long-awaited book, Great Eastern Hotel. The novel that runs into 900 plus pages is set in 1940s Calcutta and attempts to create sensory imaginations of touch and smell, apart from telling a story.

Journalists Rajdeep Sardesai and Monideepa Banerjie discussed the former’s book, 2024: The Election That Surprised India with Sardesai stating that the election had restored his faith in democracy.

The highlight of the day was a session on patriarchy titled Papa Don’t Preach where author Nusrat F Jafri spoke about choosing one’s battles and about how difficult it still is for women to make space for themselves in cinematography. Author and columnist Sandip Roy talked about how privileges function in layers and how individuals who might belong to a marginalized community can still carry certain other forms of privilege. Journalist and author Neha Dixit explained that love jihad was the perfect example of violently mansplaining life choices to women.

Salil Tripathi and Ashis Nandy at AKLF (Courtesy AKLF)

On the last day, Salil Tripathi, author, The Gujaratis, and academic Ashis Nandy shared their experiences of Gujarat and its people at a packed session. Tripathi eloquently described the community as one living with contradictions; that, on the one hand, worships Gandhi while, on the other, are prejudiced against Muslims. Later, historian Ramachandra Guha spoke about his latest volume, Speaking with Nature, which chronicles the lives of several prominent individuals and their contributions to environmentalism.

For this reporter, the one session that really stood out was Of Deities, Demons, Queens and Kings that had several mythology writers sharing their perspectives. Anuja Chandramouli insisted that certain myths had been transformed to sanitize women; she aims to source the original stories and present them as they are. The conversation took an interesting turn when Akshat Gupta tried to correlate certain imagery found in mythology with that of science. Anand Neelakantan then criticized the tendency to reverse engineer modern knowledge to fit into spiritual and religious narratives. “That basically contradicts the tenets of the Upanishads, which demand that we be logical,” he said adding that we need to avoid claiming, for instance, that Lord Ganpati is an example of plastic surgery and things in that vein.

Also interesting was the Poetry Cafe held simultaneously at the Alliance Française du Bengale where several poets like Akhil Katyal, Anupama Raju and Iryna Vikyrchak recited from their work. The Oxford Junior Literary Festival at the Oxford Bookstore also drew in a younger crowd.

In the end, The Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival ensured that people from diverse age groups were kept engaged throughout with interesting and lively discussions.

Chittajit Mitra (he/him) is a queer writer, translator and editor from Allahabad. He is co-founder of RAQS, an organization working on gender, sexuality and mental health.