The Goa Art Lit Fest
Come December and the Goa Art /Lit Festival makes
headlines with a contingent of authors descending on Goa to regale audiences
with their voices. It is a treat par excellence for the local population,
school and college students and the avid readers who visit to savour the
literary curry. The festival has been gaining prominence since its inception
and this year it turned a milestone. A well conceived fair executed with a
touch of intimacy and class.
The highlights of the fest included a battery of
poets, four of whom were the finalists for the Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize
to be announced in January at JLF. Arundhati Subramaniam and Sridala Swami,
with their self-assured stance and flawless performance-poetry rendition, stood
apart. Ranjit Hoskote and Keki Daruwalla alternated with a collected and
powerful recitation of their poems.
Arundhati’s poems
intertwine the realms of bodies, intellect and the spiritual. She enunciated poems from her latest
collection When God is a Traveller. Disparate landscapes and a dichotomy of
desires assail her verses: ‘the gossamer flurry / of your
breath, the wild nearness / of your heart beat’, and yet that ‘there is more to
desire than the tribal shudder / in the loins.’ The unfathomable mysteries:
‘Remember I am as / dog eared / soiled / puzzled / as you are / and as much
in love.’
Keki Daruwalla’s ex tempore elocution of his poem at Raj
Bhawan about first ten years after his year of birth(1937) ended on I wouldn’t cite it even if it rhymes with
heaven/ when it comes to 1947.....Edwin Thumboos poignant maiden poem, on
deleting phone numbers of friends and
family who are no longer there, wrung the audiences’ hearts and Joshua Ip with
his exuberant mannerism endeared himself to the crowds.
Art world of color and lines was aptly
represented by Daisy Rockwell and Pierre Legrand. Rockwell’s debut India
exhibition ‘Odalisque' invoked the famous Odalisque paintings of
Francois Boucher and Ingres in the viewer’s mind-eye. But the recollection was
completely disrupted by what Rockwell had on display. The series represented Odalisque as a fully
participative subject, choosing consciously her pose and manner of depiction in
the paintings. The artist and the subject seemed to have become co-creators in
the process of signifying each stance and pose with complete objectivity and
freedom. ‘A long digression from the19th
century reclining female figure, often nude or
semi-clad in shawls or loose robes, meant to invoke Oriental decadence and
opulence.’ (VM)
The Odalisque may be
traced back to the renaissance painter Titian’s Venus of Urbino who veiled his eroticism in myth and
Ingres who transfigured the theme of mythological nude to an exotic object of
desire tending to romanticism. The Odalisque changed and evolved with the
masterful strokes of Edouard Manet’s ‘Olympia’.
The latter’s work was a tour de force, totally in control of sexuality.
Matisse and Picasso imbued it with abstraction. Viewing Rockwell’s work, it felt
that the Odalisque had truly arrived at the gates of a conscious sexual
freedom.
Writing in Colour, a
conversation and presentation, showcased the Auroville artist Pierre Legrand’s unique artist works. It underlined the
ubiquitous geometrically-carved meditative art riding on a pictorial alphabet
indicative of a universal unity in the cosmos, made up of animate and inanimate
matter.
Exclusive book launches continued to colour
the four-day festival intermittently. Rajmohan Gandhi’s and Mamang Dai’s
historical-fiction based in Gujarat and Arunachal Pradesh respectively made
interesting hearing. Rajdeep Sardesai’s The Election That Changed India mixed
polemics with a booming baritone and lured many a person to the Zuiyo lawns.
Book focus on cook-books enthralled the connoisseurs and Frederika Menezes won
over hearts with her writing: Unforgotten. The House with the Green Roof, a
humorous crime-story with a signature suspense-tune and Charlie Chaplin
sequences, was a laugh riot – light and barmy.....I was in conversation with
the author Ashish Vikram.
The discussion on
crafting a short story shifted attention to great story writers of literature:
Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italio Calvino and Paul Zarkaria (in
translation). The easy rapport between Githa Hariharan and Keki Daruwalla
facilitated an easy flow of witty conversation. Young literature with voices
from Britain, Australia and Goa moderated by me threw up the lacunae in Indian
fiction and the inclusion of sensitive dark subjects in teen literature. Changing India with Vidhya Dahejia, TM
Krishna and Rajmohan Gandhi highlighted changing Indian culture and inheritance
and was followed by an equally interesting exchange between Maria Couto and
Vrinda Nabar in memory to memoir. Each dwelt on her book based on her mother’s
journey with a backdrop of evolving values and traditional societal structures.
Sudeep Chakravarti and Hindol Sengupta exchanged notes on their writings -
Clear Hold Build, and Recasting India respectively. While the former stressed
the skewed business houses/human rights issues, the latter paved way for a
prosperous economic India through entrepreneurship. Many cities and countries
like Singapore, Nepal, Kenya and East Africa
were reinvented through talks on historical stories and later status quo
in these lands. Prominent Goan writers like Damodar Mauzo, Wilfred goes and
Tony Martin showcased their writings and regaled the audience with stories from
Goa. Empowering the margins, Dalit writings and Ambedkar’s India Project too
found special focus at the festival.
Workshop on
translation by Mini Krishnan and talks with Vidya Pai and Xavier Cota was
constructive without being lost in dialectics. Childrens’ Hour each day in the
morning was a resounding success with a
succession of writers, poets, musicians and journalists interacting with
students from different schools and colleges of Goa. An opportunity not to be
missed by educational institutions in the years to come..... Chee Malabar the
Indo-American rapper and Ali Aftab Saeed of the Beygairat Band from Pakistan
suffused color in the evenings with their musical strains. Bird watching and
wildlife conservation too featured in the festival and the wine tasting session with the
sommelier from Sula Wines was a novelty.....
Goa Art Lit festival
is here to stay, mark your calenders for the next year now.......
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