Bhopal Literature and Art Festival - Part 1

From Civil Servant to Cultural Conductor: The successful Bhopal Literature Festival held between 12-14th January 2019 at the prestigious Bharat Bhawan has demonstrated that brilliance is absolute and reveals itself no matter what the field of activity.

Raghav Chandra, who retired recently as Secretary in the Government of India and who is known for the stellar work, especially in the field of infrastructure – as Chairman NHAI, Principal Secretary Urban Development, Managing Director Industrial Development Corporation, and as Commissioner of the MP Housing Board, aptly proved his all-round competence in the cultural sphere as well. He conceptualized the Bhopal Literature and Art Festival, created a core team, planned it carefully and executed it meticulously. The three-day festival with three parallel sessions each day, a cultural-spiritual immersion program in the morning and a cultural program in the evening attracted about 70 authors, discussants and artists from across India and abroad and hundreds of cognoscenti from Bhopal and its environs. The fragrance of this provocative and enticing event will resonate wide and far for a long time to come.

The Literary Festival was a buzzing cornucopia of Padma Shri and National awardees. While all 56 sessions were curated thoughtfully some of the popular and more notable authors and discussants who attended this literary and artistic extravaganza were: environmentalists Pradeep Krishen, Bittu Sahgal, Pranay Lal and Vivek Menon; diplomat/civil servants Pavan Varma, TCA Raghavan,Amar Sinha, Rajiv Mehrishi, Amitabh Kant, Anthony de Sa, Rajni Sekhri Sibal and SY Quraishi; military, intelligence and diplomacy experts General Ata Hasnain, General Mohinder Puri, Shiv Kunal Verma and AS Dulat (an international expert on South Asia, Professor Barnett Rubin came all the way from the United States to listen to the discussions); social commentators Keki Daruwalla, Bachi Karkaria, Vinita Dawra Nangia, Anil Dharker, Seema Goswami, Vinita Bakshi, Ashali Verma and Koral Dasgupta; historians/mythologists  Shonaleeka Kaul, Ashali Verma, KK Chakravarty, Rima Hooja, Christopher Doyle; researcher/scholars like Madhavi Menon who is an authority on human behavior and sexuality, Radhakrishan Pillai who has written extensively on the learnings from Chanakya, Babli Moitra Saraf who has written literature keeping children in mind, Santosh Mehrotra Professor of Economics in JNU, Ila Pattnaik Professor in NIFP, Simran Chadha who has analysed the conversion of literature into cinema; management experts like Sachit Jain, Ashwini Lohani, V Kumaraswamy and Animesh Parihar; art scholars and artists like Manish Pushkale, Akhilesh, Bhajju Shyam, Jyotindra Jain, Alka Pande, Anubhav Nath, Tara Douglas, Gita Wolf, Vivek Tembe, John Bowles, Erwin and Christine Newumeyer; Hindi poets and writers like Udayan Vajpeyi, Ashok Chakradhar, Nandkishore Acharya, Arun Kamal, Ratan Thiyam, Ramesh Chandra Shah, Santosh Chaubey, Purushottam Agarwal. There were sessions on food and fitness as well with the noted architect Sunita Kohli talking about her book on Awadhi Cuisine, Kavita Devgan discussing from her book Ultimate Grandmother Hacks and Meera Das narrating the discovery of Neematnama which travelled from Mandu to Tipu Sultan’s court in the seventeenth century.

There was also involvement of young and old civil servants and writers: Hariranjan Rao, Pallavi Govil, Tejaswi Naik, Sufiyah Quraishi, SC Behar and R Parasuram and most importantly of civil servant wives: Seema Raizada, Suchita Malik, Preeti Chandra and Atima Mankotia.

What distinguished this literature and art event from others of this ilk were the unremitting timelines, the overall gravitas and the conformity to discussions based on literature and art. Therefore, even when cinema was discussed, it was done without depending on film stars to give it additional glamour.