A few moments after stepping out of the Air India flight from Dhaka to Kolkata after attending the Dhaka Lit Fest 2016, my band of co-passengers and I arrived at the immigration area. There was an airport staff directing the passengers into two separate queues.
“Bangladesh? Ei dike” (Bangladesh? This way), he shouted.
He was not stereotyping. He was just using common sense, for he knew from experience and data that most non-Indian citizens in that Dhaka-Kolkata flight would invariably be Bangladesh citizens.
That he spoke in Bangla to the de-planing crowd also reflected his grasp over the natural and usual demography of the passengers on a Dhaka-Kolkata flight, that most passengers would be Bengali speakers, either from the east or west.
It is not as if Air India does not know this.
When Air India has a Dhaka-Kolkata flight where a huge majority of passengers naturally, but not necessarily, understand English or Hindi, not a single Air India announcement is made in the Kolkata airport, and, most crucially, on-board while giving safety instructions, in Bangla.
The “acceptable” Bengali on-board a Dhaka-Kolkata flight is one who understands English or Hindi.
A Bengali lady who does not know English or Hindi does not deserve to be fully serviced at the airport or on-board. She is made to feel inadequate and out of place.
It is a sad, sad commentary on the diversity showcasing PR blitz called “Incredible India.” This exclusion was rammed into my Bengali self especially strongly, as I was returning from Dhaka after attending what is probably the most inclusive literature festival in the whole sub-continent.
The Dhaka Lit Fest is arguably South Asia’s most diverse and mass-friendly primarily Anglophone literature festival. Bangladesh is home to a rich literary cultural tradition that spanned both Bengals, and is increasingly situated in Bengal’s eastern part.
Thus, the agenda of the festival organisers of bringing Bangladesh to the world and the world to Bangladesh is well taken. It is an important project.
But the more important project and one in which the Dhaka Lit Fest has succeeded with flying colours was to attract people of Dhaka and beyond in Bangladesh to the festival situated in the historic campus of the Bangla Academy.
This was not some limited entry festival for the suited-booted, though they were there too. This was not some lavish winter tent in the desert for the Delhi elite and business deals venue that Jaipur Lit Fest is. People came in thousands.
The footfall on the least attended day was over 10,000, according to the organisers. The other days had much larger crowds. And what distinguished this from the other lit fests that span the sub-continent is the increasing connect and relevance of this festival in the city to its citizens, as a part of Dhaka’s annual cultural calendar.
It is a festival of Dhaka where the location is not incidental but fundamental to the identity of the festival. Some other fests have more events, some have larger crowds drawn in from the surrounds in a site that was chosen for stoking oriental fantasies of the mystic East, some have a bigger list of big names.
Dhaka had the right mix of names and events, and an active participation of the citizens; and a crowd that knows they have a right to be there.
I was returning from Dhaka after attending what is probably the most inclusive literature festival in the whole sub-continent
Leaving behind its Hay days, the Dhaka Lit Fest has been scaling newer heights. And there was much to see, learn, and absorb. Nobel laureate VS Naipaul might have had star value in the literary world with a sub-continental connect that is unique among living Nobel laureates in literature, but it was touching to see him come down to Bengal, to Dhaka, in his infirm wheelchair-bound state and unbound spirits.
In Ruddhoshor, the event on free speech, there were individuals on stage and in the audience who were on hit lists of the forces of darkness.
From that stage, illuminated voices went up against Section 57 of ICT laws of Bangladesh -- speaking truth to power as they should. The Catalan poet Carles Torner from Barcelona, the slam poetry champion Vuyelwa Maluleke from South Africa, Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov, and many others came from distant shores as well as from elsewhere in the sub-continent.
Dr Abed Chaudhury and Dr Sanjeev Jain deliberated on the ethics of genetics in a session I moderated. There were events and panels spanning fiction, music, crime, journeys, the world where Trump is in charge, and much more. There was the fascinating session on the Neuroscience of Aesthetics moderated by Kazi K Ashraf.
And then there was the world of Bangla -- from poetry readings to literary discussions to contemplation about the survival of Bangla in this increasingly globalised and mono-cultural world.
There was music and dance, for even in dark times, there will be music and dance. From Bengal’s own Palagaan to a tribute to Bob Dylan and Baul Rob Fakir to musical play about Behula Lokhindor.
The mesmerising inaugural music by Rezwana Chowdhury Bonya’s group was stirring to say the least in the grand DLF décor and the celebratory milieu of the Dr Shahidullah Hall of Bangla Academy, for it is not easy to please people with songs that have been listened to so many times by so many before.
The Dhaka Lit Fest has strived hard to shed the anti-Bengali, Anglophone-elite charge that was often lobbed at the Hay Festival. I saw many erstwhile opponents of that strain having lively addas at the Dhaka Lit Fest, on and off stage.
Last year, when I attended the festival, there was massive paranoia among foreign visitors leading to 19 cancellations. I was greeted with a note on my hotel bed requesting me not to venture out on the next day, when a hartal had been announced by Jamaat.
This year, the number of cancellations was five. Still, to assuage freighted nerves of the Euro-American world, there was exemplary security cover, for any mishap would have tarnished the already tarnished image of Bangladesh, due to the series of attacks on foreigners, religious minorities, queer people, baul-fakirs, non-extremist Muslim divines, free-thinkers, and bloggers.
Such an arrangement requires co-operation of the government of the day as is the case in any event of this profile anywhere in the world under similar or even more “normal” circumstances. The events, thankfully, concluded eventlessly.
The Dhaka Lit Fest ended on November 19, but did it?
There were conversations, associations, connections, and much more that were happening between speakers, between speakers and audiences, and in between audiences.
After my panel on Hindi hegemony, Kanak Mani Dixit, the stalwart journalist-editor of Southasian and I conversed on how the iconic Himalmag could be revived in a new avatar. We planned excitedly to meet again elsewhere, gathering others, for newer journeys. And that’s how festivals of culture and literatures should end. By germinating new beginnings.
Garga Chatterjee is a political and cultural commentator. He can be followed on twitter @gargac.