The Sunday Haul at the Hyderabad Literary Festival (on 29-01-2023)

 Since the past few years I haven’t been too interested in the Hyderabad Lit Fest (not that it matters to anyone) and this year too I felt the same kind of disappointment. I could go only on the last day of the HLF 2023, on Sunday, and I felt out of place amidst the crowd but I couldn’t place why I felt the way I felt. Anyway, I sat in a couple of sessions watched the people in the sessions intently listening to the authors. Of course, there was the book counter and I managed to buy two books almost emptying my wallet on just these two titles. 

 

I don’t know why I haven’t read much of what Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has written on literature in English in India. I have a copy of his ‘An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English’ and had also read it a long time back but I haven’t found anything else by him other than a collection of his poetry ‘The Transfiguring Places’ that I found a not long after I found ‘An Illustrated History of Indian Literature in English’. I picked up a copy of ‘Partial Recall’ by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra- Essays on Literature and Literary History’ that is just what I wanted to read. There are eleven essays in it and if the Introduction is anything to go by (there’s some scathing criticism of the reviewers and critics) then it promises to be one good read. 

I read the title essay that was about his childhood in Bhilai, and also studying in Allahabad where he along with his friends brought out a magazine. It is a delightful essay written in a conversational tone about his attempts to write poetry, about his friend Amit who later dies of cancer. After reading this essay I want to read the other ones too right away instead of putting off reading the book to a later time. 

The next book I picked up was a copy of ‘Writing the City’ edited by Stuti Khanna that had an attractive cover though I did not pick it up for the cover but for what was inside: essays by some writers about the cities they live or lived in. It is a collection of essays by fourteen writers that include Chandrahas Choudhury (on Bombay and Delhi), Sumana Roy (on Siliguri), Manju Kapur, Amitabha Bagchi, and also Ankush Saikia among others. The essays are in first person and most of the writers write about their writing and this is something I like to read. However, this slim volume of over a hundred and ten pages put me back by more than eight hundred rupees.