Over 60 literary festivals are organized across the country. None of them focus on celebrating India’s military history. And India ought to have more war stories than most countries, given how conflicts have shaped the nation’s history.
Cmde Srikant B. Kesnur felt a compelling need to fill this gap! “We felt the need for a dedicated literature festival on Geopolitics, Military and Social Sciences,” he says.
The first such LitFest is being organized at the historic National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai and is being called the Max City VoW LitFest. Historian and army veteran Probal Dasgupta, who has helped curate the fest says, “Between 1914 and 1918, close to 1.5 million Indian soldiers participated in World War I but 74,000 of them did not come back—these are official figures. But we haven’t told their stories. In 1915, Indian soldiers registered the only Allied victory in the Gallipoli campaign. The irony is that Sikh, Punjabi and Gurkha troops who recorded the victory are forgotten. We don’t even have official histories of the 1962 (India-China) and 1971 (India-Pakistan) wars!
Author Sanjeev Sanyal of the PM’s Economic Advisory Council talks about a different kind of gap; the language gap. He says, “Indian literature is going through a big renaissance over the last ten years. Different kinds of topics ranging from history to geo-politics and fiction have proliferated. There is clearly a big pool of excellent writers in India now although a lot of the serious writing in non-fiction is concentrated in English. We need this to spread to Indian languages where modern non-fiction is still dependent on translations.”
The challenge with writing history is of course, that no two historians are likely to agree with each other. “Any television debate shows that we do not agree on what happened yesterday, so why do we expect historians to agree with happened 2000 years ago? What matters is that the different narratives are based on available evidence,” Sanyal adds.
This LitFest provides a platform away from Delhi for discussion on politics, policy, wars, geography and history. It also seeks to uncover India’s position in the world through the medium of literature. Mumbai-based author Vaibhav Purandare weighs in, “I see more writing emerging at the intersection of India and the world. My book ‘Hitler and India’ describes in detail Hitler’s hatred and contempt for India – a truth which has been kept from public view for decades. So much history is yet to be properly recorded and so much sense is yet to be made of India’s relation to the world – past and present.”
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The festival will also see former NITI Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant’s book, How India Scaled Mount G20, Air Vice Marshall Arjun Subramaniam’s Shooting Straight, Lt Gen Y.K. Joshi’s Who Dares Wins (a Vir Chakra awardee for his role in the Kargil War), and K.V. Ramesh’s Lights, Camera, War, being launched.
Speaking about the need to mainstream ‘military’ literature, Probal Dasgupta adds, “The lens we use to view war stories needs to undergo change. Currently, they are viewed in isolation. Must we categorize these narratives of war, as separate from other stories about our society? After all, these stories are observations on societies in conflict, much like accounts of Hemingway, Sassoon and Wilfred Owen’s works did for the west in the 20th century.”
An exciting weekend for Mumbai as 50 authors, 18 sessions and two iconic venues Kitabkhana and NGMA come together to celebrate this uniquely themed festival on 1st and 2nd of March. As a nation state, we are yet to take the reins, when it comes to storytelling about our own history. An opportunity for all passionate writers and historians, no less.
Reeta Ramamurthy Gupta is a columnist and bestselling biographer. She is credited with the internationally acclaimed Red Dot Experiment, a decadal six-nation study on how ‘culture impacts communication.’ Asia’s first reading coach, you can find her on Instagram @OfficialReetaGupta.