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VOL. XXIV NO. 21, February 16-28, 2015
Youth make Lit-for-Life vibrant
(By A Staff Reporter)

To me, December is always the best time to be in Chennai and that is thanks to the Music Season. For the past few years, January too has been very exciting, in part because of The Hindu’s Literary aka Lit For Life (LFL) Festival. The two cannot be compared, of course. The music season lasts much longer and is spread over several venues. The LFL is for three action-filled days at the the Sir Mutha Venkatasubba Rao Auditorium and an open air pavilion, both located in the Lady Andal School campus.

If there is one single element that distinguishes the LFL from the music season, however, it is the presence of the youth in large numbers at the former. They make for a vibrant atmosphere, be they volunteers or members of the audience. Of course, the LFL has the familiar faces that can be seen at all cultural events in the city, with one exception who is a fixture at all such programmes all over the world and who made it to the LFL as well, but that person shall be nameless.

Perhaps it was because the event coincided with the Pongal holidays this year, or perhaps the event has acquired a critical mass of an audience thanks to its consistent quality of programmes over the years, the attendance was at an all-time high for almost all the events. Even the post-lunch and late evening slots had full houses. In terms of the number of events, well, any sabha would have been proud of the statistics – 44 sessions, 94 panellists from six countries, workshops and performances. What made the difference was the presence of over 2000 people at each session – no sabha can match that on all days of its festival.

Understandably so, the issue concerning Perumal Murugan dominated the festival. His absence was sorely felt, but there was no way out of that once he had announced his withdrawal from the world of letters. But the palpable sense of empathy with him made up for his staying away to an extent. The festival opened with a resolution passed on the matter. Tabled by N Ram, Chairman of Kasturi & Sons Limited, it stated that “Literature and society become poorer every time the forces of intimidation and censorship are allowed to prevail against the forces of creative utterance.” It called upon “State and Central authorities, political parties, and civil society to respect and protect freedom of expression as an inalienable fundamental right.” The controversy over Perumal Murugan’s Madhrubagan was in fact to be brought up in various panel discussions right through the festival.

The sheer variety of events in the festival showed the range that the world of books encompasses – there were programmes on fiction, travel, politics, gender, history, biography, freedom of expression, language, cinema, theatre and culinary skills, to name but a few. There was even a session on skincare which, according to those who attended, was a phenomenal success, with Dr. Sharad Paul having everyone eating out of his hands. (Some in the audience were not above asking for some free treatment in the question-and-answer session!)

I could not make it to as many sessions as I would have liked to, but here are a few that I went to and which I found particularly impressive:

‘Feminine form – the site of violence’, the participants being Justice Prabha Sridevan, Ramesh Gopalakrishnan, Ammu Joseph and U. Vasuki

A session of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka with Nirupama Subramanian in conversation with Salil Tripathi and Samanth Subramaniam.

Prince Rama Varma and T.V. Gopalakrishnan on the lyrics of music.

‘This Land, Our Country’ by P. Sainath.

‘Images and Imagery of Memory’ with Sushila Ravindranath in conversation with Alarmel Valli and Sangeetham Srinivasa Rao.

Aatish Taseer in conversation with Ranvir Shah on his learning Sanskrit to hear the “voice of classical India”.

Ahdaf Soueif, Rajmohan Gandhi, Damon Galgut and Meena Kandasamy on the growth of people power.

‘Lotus Leaves, Water Words’ a reading performance directed by Prasanna Ramaswamy.

There were also a whole lot of street plays put on by students in a side wing and there were the workshops, none of which I could attend. Besides the stalls selling books, there was a new initiative by way of Author TV, a channel that focusses on men and women of letters. This team interviewed authors on their work and what was very impressive was the way the anchor managed to ask pertinent questions to each writer, based on his or her work. Yet another first in the LFL series was a heritage walk I conducted in the Madras Literary Society campus, where the content had entirely to do with books.

As for the browsing and sluicing, it was of the highest order with a series of food stalls catering to everyone’s tastes. ‘Vivekananda coffee’, though it is not known if that great man subscribed to that beverage, was in particular demand. The authors’ lounge provided a private space where panellists could come together before the event and work out the nuances of their programmes. It also provided a space to network in, as was evident from the regular at international festivals referred to above who managed to gatecrash and network like a spider, this despite not having any scheduled event at the lit fest. But let us leave that aside.

All the participants praised the hospitality that was provided by the team from The Hindu. The  attention paid to their travel and stay, the welcome at the venue, the eye for detail for the small comforts that make all the difference, all of this came in for lavish praise. It was understated South Indian hospitality at its best.

The Hindu’s Lit For Life event may not have been the largest or the most high profile of its kind, but it was in every way a wonderful gift from the city’s best-known newspaper to Madras that is Chennai. And given that this is a metropolis of book lovers (where else do you have a Book Club that meets with such regularity?), it had the audience that made the effort worth the while. May the festival continue in the years to come and become a part of the city’s social calendar.

So much still to write about Madras

As part of The Hindu’s Lit for Life festival, Dr. A. R. Venkatachalapathy and Sriram V. participated in a session discussing ‘Writings on Chennai’. The discussion, presented to a near full house, centred chiefly on the way the city has been presented in writings over the centuries.

The speakers agreed that Madras has been lucky as far as documented history since 1639 is concerned. We have had J Talboys Wheeler (Madras in the Olden Time), HD Love (Vestiges of Old Madras) and S. Muthiah (several works, of which Madras Rediscovered is the most popular) who between them have covered over three centuries. But what is interesting is that there is still much more to be done. Both Calcutta and Delhi, for instance, have benefited from a plethora of subaltern studies with the former city even having a detailed street-wise history.

Despite having been a bit of a backwater for most of the British era, what is surprising is the number of interesting tales that keep cropping up in the history of the city. The early skirmishes between Protestant Madras and Catholic San Thomé were highlighted by Sriram in this context and he narrated a tale of how a chaplain from the Fort was kidnapped by the Portuguese when he set out for an evening walk. Agent Greenhill of the East India Company retaliated by apprehending a Catholic priest of San Thomé and had him confined to Fort St George. But such were the fortifications that the prisoner managed to scale them and escape. Not so lucky was the British chaplain who was sent off to Goa to face the Inquisition and came back many years later.

Dr. Venkatachalapathy in turn spoke of how the tramways of Madras would be an excellent documentation of the city’s history. In this context he narrated a couple of anecdotes. The first concerned the patriot VO Chidambaram Pillai’s meeting with Gandhi. In the letter that he wrote to the latter, Pillai stated that he could come only by tram to meet him and then fixed the time accordingly. It is an indication, said Dr Venkatachalapathy, of how much Pillai had come down in life. A man who once operated ships and threatened British hegemony was reduced to travelling by tram. In the context of the trams, Dr Venkatachalapathy also narrated the circumstances in which the Poonamalle High Road shed of the tramways was transformed into Periyar Thidal. It was in the 1950s when the tramways were wound up and the sheds were being auctioned. Periyar, who always had difficulty in finding a suitable public space for his speeches, given their fiery content, decided on the advice of friends to buy a part of the shed space. He then converted it into a public arena, granting permission for anyone and everyone to use it, including those who wanted to hold meetings there to condemn his rationalist outlook!

Sriram then spoke of how the medical history of Madras would be another suitable subject. He narrated in brief the life of Mary Ann Dacomb Scharlieb, the first qualified woman doctor of Madras who later became one of the earliest women MDs of the world. In 1885, she, at the express desire of Queen Victoria, began the Royal Victoria Caste and Gosha Hospital, which later moved to Triplicane. Today it is the Kasturba Gandhi Hospital and is doing pioneering work in women’s health. If Dr Scharlieb was to rewrite the fate of several women through her medical practice, she was to inadvertently play an important role in another aspect – widow rehabilitation. This came about thanks to her employing the forceps for perhaps the first time in the city, to help in the birth of a baby girl. Such was the force applied that it left a couple of depressions in the skull which remained right through the delivered baby’s life. That girl would grow up to be Sister R S Subbalakshmi!

The conversation then veered towards press freedom and the freedom of expression. In this context, Dr Venkatachalapathy spoke of how the Madras Dramatic Performance Act of 1954 was legislated to suppress just one man – M R Radha. He, of course, was not in any way deterred by it and he fought it tooth and nail, first by demanding that the notices sent to him be in Tamil and not English, and later by stating that everyone who came to his plays thoroughly enjoyed them and so those who did not like them or considered them offensive were best advised to stay away!

Radha was not the first to be suppressed. One of the earliest instances of the Indian Penal Code being used for suppressing a book on grounds of obscenity was in 1910 when Bangalore Nagarathnamma published Muddu Palani’s 17th Century erotic classic, Radhika Santwanamu. After Sriram had finished narrating the tale behind this, Dr Venkatachalapthy took up the thread and spoke of how even chapbooks were suppressed the same way for seditious content. Both speakers agreed that the content in many of these cheap publications were important sources of the city’s history. The topics largely centred on murders, dacoities and other sensations but there were others such as the People’s Park Vazhi Nadai Chindu that traces the route from George Town to Mylapore in the early 1900s. Sriram then disclosed as to how he has walked the entire stretch as depicted in the chindu and during the four-hour journey discovered that a large part of what was described in the song was still standing!

Dr Venkatachalapathy related how the chapbooks survived despite being printed on cheap paper. When the information contained in them were no longer current, they were bound together and sold as compilations. These were painstakingly bought by the Government, which seriously studied them for harmful content and then filed them away. Several of these are in British archives now, though the Roja Muthiah Research Library in Chennai also has a good selection. Both speakers suggested that researchers should go through these in detail to unearth more nuggets on Chennai.

The time allotted for the talk being just about 20 minutes, it ended even before it began. A ten-minute question-answer session followed wherein many reminisced about the city they had grown up with and  how it had changed. Perhaps that too would make for a good history!

-By A Special Correspondent

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In this issue

Is this building doomed?
Madras Landmarks - 50 years ago
Wake up, Madras, save our walls
The emigrants' friend
Youth make Lit-for-Life vibrant
Plans, once, for rail-canal link
The day a Prime Minister heard out students
'PT, my daily bus at Lawder's Gate'

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