Over the hills and far away: Being at the Sikkim Arts and Literature Festival

Recently a friend of mine who lives in New York asked me with some bewilderment, “What’s going on with lit fests in India? You throw a stone, you hit one?” She was only half joking. Last month alone, when temperatures have been too high to even leave the house, I’ve been invited to three (one in 40-degree Gujarat).

As an author who hasn’t had a book out in some years, I suppose I should be grateful, but after a couple of terrible experiences—bad organisation, shifting schedules, weakly thought-out sessions with writers randomly tossed together—the gratitude doesn’t just wane, it teeters on trepidation.

But I’m a sucker for the mountains, and when, during an unthinkably hot week, I received an invite to the Sikkim Arts and Literature Festival, I immediately said yes, dreaming of sweater-weather.

Tickets booked, I landed eagerly at Bagdogra airport without so much as a hotel name in hand. I was met by an organiser who popped me into a car. I mapped the route to Yuksom, the festival location, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It said eight hours. I settled in for a long and winding ride.

The magic of a festival being as remotely located as this one is that every speaker and panelist who makes it, really wants to be there. No one takes a flight (some of us took two) and an 8-hour car journey otherwise. Once I arrived at the venue, I wondered if this fact brought to the festival a variety of keenness and sincerity many literary events today miss.

The sessions took place in one large tent at the top of a lush green hill, pegged in by fluttering Tibetan prayer flags. Rainclouds on the far horizon were surveyed cheerfully, as hot morning tea was served to everyone in ceramic cups, and cuddly stray dogs snoozed at our feet.

Lunch was a local affair, but what that meant was a medley of North Indian, Chinese, Nepali, Tibetan and Bengali food. There were greens I’ve never seen before, fresh off the hillside, fried fish with deadly chutneys, noodles and Manchurian next to grilled pork and jalebis.

Authors had a tent to themselves, but in a rare and actual display of the spirit of socialism everyone talks about on stage but doesn’t like to extend in real life, the same tents quickly became spaces for students and other attendees to eat in as well.

Delightfully, the mix of cultures that appeared on the menu also made for multilingual sessions—a gentle reminder of the rich heritage not just of the region, but of the country, where with just a little patience and a dash of adventure, there are whole kingdoms that might be explored.

The small but well thought out list of speakers was equally refreshing. While you had some big-city names—Nishtha Gautam of The Quint, naturalist Pranay Lal, Anand Neelakantan, the larger-than-life author of Bahubali, and bestselling novelist Anuja Chauhan—you also had the likes of young Nepali poet Nawaraj Parajuli who, much to the audience’s joy, recited 20-minute-long pieces in his native tongue, spoken by most of the incredibly large crowd present. Other speakers broke into Assamese and Nagamese.

The feeling that we were not pandering to a white audience—imagined or present—was rich and noticeable, and made for deep intimacy, despite the large numbers. JCB Prize nominee Chuden Kabimo made his way up from Kalimpong to tell us about Song of the Soil, his novel on the Gorkhaland movement of the 1980s.

Manipur, further east and on fire, was discussed with empathy and intellect, minus any finger-pointing. Teresa Rehman, the Assamese Muslim journalist who’s made it her mission to report stories from the under-represented North-East was there too. I caught her on stage in conversation with Hoihnu Hauzel, author of The Essential North-East Cookbook.

Hauzel spoke of how collecting recipes in a culture with a mostly oral tradition became imperative for her when she realised that with the advent of climate change and new farming practices, many ingredients of yore would no longer exist.

Ecology was a key topic, approached pointedly in sessions like ‘Abode of the Gods’, a discussion around Kangchendzonga National Park, which the town of Yuksom flanks. While nature became the unexpected locus for other sessions, like the one where dashing Gangtok architect Prashant Pradhan spoke about sustainable construction being the only answer for the future.

The discussions didn’t feel forced, the way talk around the global climate crisis often does at formal events. Maybe it was also the setting—or the astonishing fact that there wasn’t a single plastic water bottle or thermocol plate in sight—that made the conversation on how we might protect the earth feel natural, and wise, like an unofficial theme running through.

More than talk, there was a sense of listening that was truly surprising, given that much of the audience was made up of teenagers and school children. Even a lengthy speech by the chief minister, whose brainchild the festival apparently was, did not thin out the ranks. And they showed up twice as thick for Bipul Chhetri’s concert on Yuksom’s helipad that night.

As the rain came down and Chhetri apologised for the weather to his screaming fans, they laughed, opened their umbrellas, and danced in the downpour with a passion that soon overtook us all.

I tucked myself into bed that night feeling like I’d been given the gift of a lesson. It was not just the abandon with which people continued singing songs long into that cold wet night, it was also the sense of wonder that had prevailed through the day. How rare it was to see people who usually turn up to express how much they know sitting back humbly to listen, and to learn. And all of it with a remarkable ease and lack of artifice.

The efficiency and oiled wheels of the festival partly had to do with it being handled by Teamwork Arts. But I believe, after what I saw, that it’s also an example of patronage gone right, volunteership as lifestyle, and the cultural as a set of shared, shifting experiences.

While there was some muttering in the ferns about how the bigger festivals could use a dash of this quaintness and connection, I think there’s room and requirement for all. The mega ones glittering with stars, and then the intimate ones, where you end the day barefoot on the grass at a monastery, telling strangers your dreams.

(KARUNA EZARA PARIKH is a Kolkata-based author)