Dumka, Jharkhand
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Dumka State Library Literature Festival
2022, 23
Abhishek Angad, March 20, 2023: The Indian Express
NEARLY 60 years ago, a ‘Bhramansheel Pustakalay’ (mobile library) delivered books and newspapers in rural Santhal Pargana. But this only came to light recently, when the district administration decided to fix the dilapidated public library in Dumka, Jharkhand, in 2021.
As the administration, led by Deputy Commissioner R S Shukla, began digitising and cataloguing the books gathering dust in the public library and improving resources, they stumbled upon the forgotten van which served as the mobile library. This then inspired them to hold their own literary event, the Dumka State Library Literature Festival, in April 2022.
The district has held three literary events since then, including the second edition of the two-day Dumka literature festival that ended on Sunday and a memorial lecture on Norwegian missionary Paul Olaf Bodding, who came to India and wrote about Santhali culture, folk tales and grammar.
“The library had books like economist Ashok Mitra’s A Prattler’s Tale and poet Nazeer Akbarabadi’s Banjara Nama. I wanted to do justice to these resources… Then, Deputy Development Commissioner Karn Satyarthi [a 2016 batch IAS officer] helped us make this festival a reality,” said Shukla, a 2012 batch IAS officer.
Among the government officials, Dumka Divisional Forest Officer Satwik Vyas (2018-batch IFS officer) had also been part of the organising committee since the first literature festival. A prominent member of Shukla’s team is Odisha-based writer and poet Akshaya Bahibala. The co-founder of Walking BookFairs, a mobile library that has travelled across India, Bahibala first found the Bhramansheel Pustakalay van and helped refurbish it.
“After we refurbished the van — although it is not mobile now — we started holding small literary events at the library. We brought in writers from across the country. Each session last year was full, which showed people’s appetite for such events,” said Bahibala, who was instrumental in getting personalities like novelist and travel writer Chandrahas Choudhury, and publishers Ravi Singh of Speaking Tiger and Naveen Kishore of Seagull Books to attend the event this year.
Choudhury said: “Akshaya was restoring that van [the mobile library], when he invited me to Dumka. Last year, we put the festival together in three weeks. Many writers enjoyed coming here because they met the kind of readers they don’t usually meet. Everybody was delighted to hear the history of Dumka, the library and the van, which is why I suggested that we should call it the Dumka State Library Literature Festival. Some people even returned for the second edition this year.”
Cut to Saturday, Day One of the festival. At a session on ‘How I Came to Writing’, International Booker Prize winner Geetanjali Shree called the Dumka event “very important”. “It is like finding my own centre… It would have been a loss for me had I not come here and understood how much there is that I do not know,” Shree said.
Among the panellists at the session were Choudhury, poet-writer Mihir Vatsa, author-scholar Achyut Chetan, Trinamool Congress MLA Manoranjan Byapari, and publishers Singh, Kishore, Neeta Gupta of Yatra Books and Trisha De Niyogi of Niyogi Books.
Byapari, who has published 27 novels in five languages and represents the Balagarh Assembly constituency, said he learnt to read and write during his stint in prison as a Naxal. “I write because I am angry over the injustices they commit in society. There is great anger in me and that is why I write,” he said. During a session with publishers on ‘Lessons for Small Town Writers’, 19-year-old Ajay Modi, a second-year history student at Dumka’s Santal Pargana College, asked, “How does a person from a village who struggles to make ends meet and gets a bit of information from television reach publishers?” Gupta responded: “You have already started by coming for the event.”
Singh added, “It is really remarkable that this event is happening. Corporate literature festivals, unintentionally, become doorkeepers for entertaining a certain class. Hence festivals like this play a very important part.”
“There are certain issues on who will get published when it comes to English. The focus should be on capturing oral histories rather than focusing on language. When seen from the Adivasi point of view, the mainstream history is hollow,” said noted researcher and past Fulbright Fellow Joseph Bara.
Emphasising the need to bring in local writers, Yaduvansh Pranay, Assistant Professor, Department of Hindi, Santal Pargana College, said: “We do a follow up and talk about the literature fest sessions for students like Modi. Dumka has been badly affected due to distress migration, because of which one or two generations may not have been able to transfer their oral history and culture to the next generation. I believe there will be a revival of ideas due to this literature fest.”
Later, many writers and publishers shared a single concern, “How does one institutionalise such events so they do not stop when a deputy commissioner is transferred?”
