At the Hyderabad Literary Festival 2012

The second edition of the Hyderabad Literary Festival took place from Monday to Wednesday (16-18 January, 2012) this week at the Taramati Baradari. Ever since I missed attending the first edition of HLF in December 2010 I have been planning to attend it this year. Though I couldn’t go on all three days I was present on the first and last days of the Fest. Since it was an optional holiday for the Government types I availed at and attended the festival. I applied for leave to attend on the last day. Due to work pressures I had to miss the second day which was actually a full day which had a lot of exciting sessions.

Anyway, attending the HLF was like getting hit with a blast of fresh air after spending two days in the company of so many towering literary personalities. I was very excited the day before and planned with Hari to meet up early on Monday morning, have breakfast at Minerva and be at Taramati Baradari right on time for the inaugural session. It went right as planned and we got to the venue on the dot and found the registration had begun. I too registered shelling out five hundred bucks and ticked off the sessions I wanted to attend. After a while the HLF was formally inaugurated by Gulzar, Pavan K. Varma and Chandana Khan, a senior IAS officer in the State Government.

After the inaugural, the first session I attended was ‘Salaam Hyderabad’ in which Hari was a participant along with Meena Alexander, Krishna Shastri Devulapally and Vamsi Juloori. They talked about Hyderabad, their memories of Hyderabad and the city in their novels. It was an interesting discussion but it could have been more interesting if it had been allowed to go a bit longer and if the moderator had been someone who was actually still living in Hyderabad.

Another session I found interesting was the one with Kiran Nagarkar who made a feisty defence of his novels- ‘Cuckold’ and ‘Ravan and Eddie.’ He brushed off what the critics and opponents of his novels say about them. The next session I sat through was ‘Translating Bharat’ held in the Kohinoor Hall. It was interesting to learn the difficulties translators have to face while translating works in regional languages into other regional languages and also into English. There was so much I learnt from listening to senior translators and writers like Prof Sachidananda Mohanty, Prof Udaya Narayana Singh, Jeelani Bano and someone young and intelligent like the Gujarati poet and translator Dr Hemang Desai.

Then the other session was the one with Amish Tripathi, Indu Sundaresan and Jaishree Mishra, writers of historical fiction in conversation with Dr T. Vijay Kumar. I found nothing very interesting or new in what they had to say about their books or the process of getting published.

At lunch under a shamiana it was a sight to watch people, especially youngsters, try to get Gulzar’s autograph and also get photographed with him. It gave me an idea and I bought ‘Raavi Paar’, a collection of 27 short stories by Gulzar at the bookstore outside. I had to wait a long time to get his signature on the book but I was glad I did it. Though I had planned to read Srilal Shukla’s ‘Raag Darbari’ in Hindi this year, I guess ‘Raavi Paar’ could substitute for it. It would be the first book in Hindi that I would read. I had never read anything longer than a poem in Hindi. Reading Hindi would be more difficult for me than reading Telugu since I read Telugu newspapers and occasional official stuff.

Apart from Hari, there were a few other book loving friends of mine. There was Srinath and also Rasana. I got to meet the Devulapalli couple- Krishna Shastri Devulapally and his wife, Chitra. Devulapalli is the author of ‘Ice Boys in Bell Bottoms’ whose launch I had attended a couple of months ago. There were other familiar faces- there was Sridala Swamy, Amita Talwar, Shankar Melkote and others but not many regulars who normally turn up at book launches and other literary events.

Anyway, it was an interesting first day though I did not stay till the end of the day for Pavan Varma’s book launch. I stayed back for the awards session where the renowned poet Adil Jussawala gave away the Muse India prizes to three young poets- Anindita Sen Gupta, Semeen Ali and Amrita Nair.

I tried to think of some excuses to attend the second day also but I couldn’t take the day off. On the last and final day too I teamed up with Hari and got to the venue by ten in the morning. We sat in the session with Suniti Namjoshi. I was not aware that she was in the IAS before she left it. It was an interesting and illuminating talk by her that made me decide to read at least one book by her. Unfortunately, Mark Tully had not come and I could only catch the second part of the session titled ‘Adapting to India’. It was followed by a reading of fiction by K.Srilata, Priti Aisola, Swati Chawla, Sagarika Chakraborty and Sudha Balagopal. It was interesting to listen to different voices taking us into different landscapes and stories. Two of the writers I knew, K.Srilata read out passages from her latest fiction work ‘A Table for Four’ and Priti Aisola read out from her third book in the making.

The venue was teeming with excited school children who had come to participate in a creative writing event. However, there was sparse attendance at other events especially in the sessions in Urdu and Hindi later in the afternoon. After lunch I sat in a session where four Urdu writers- read out ‘nazms’ and ‘shairi’. This was one of the most interesting sessions I had attended and I wish I could have stayed back for the ‘Mushaira’ that was slated after tea. But we reluctantly left at three in the afternoon mind filled with all that we had sat through.


It was a fine show put up by the Muse India team comprising of GSP Rao, Dr. T. Vijaya Kumar and others. They deserve to be congratulated for the successful conduct of the event despite things being what they are in Hyderabad.