https://www.heraldgoa.in/Cafe/In-Dibrugarh-with-Damodar-Mauzo/219565

Just one month after our own Goa Arts + Literature Festival, it was an
honour to be invited alongside the beloved laureate of Konkani
literature Damodar Mauzo to the first-ever Dibrugarh University
International Literature Festival, all the way across the country in
Upper Assam. Our most eminent writer is also by far our best cultural
ambassador, and it was a very special treat for me to witness and
savour the non-stop back-and-forth love embracing ‘Bhaiyee’ wherever
he moved amongst the people with his characteristic grace, humility,
and savoir faire. We were 3200 kilometres away from Goa in that
pleasant college campus surrounded by tea estates spilling down to the
mighty Brahmaputra, but it really did feel distinctly like home.

This is but another step in an established continuum that tracks back
to GALF, which Bhaiyee and I co-founded in 2010 on behalf of the Goa
Writers group in partnership with the International Centre Goa, where
Assam and the surrounding states have always remained central to the
festival DNA. Our logic was clear then and now: like so much else in
the country in our times, the cultural landscape is being
corporatized, captured and homogenized via New Delhi nexus, for which
Goa is permanently stereotyped as an irrelevant and provincial oddity.
The arrogance – indeed ignorance – is hard-wired, and nothing can be
done about it. That is why GALF was created to celebrate Goa’s own
alongside the very best talent from across the subcontinent that is
being similarly excluded from the corpus of the cabal. From day one,
this curatorial emphasis resulted in an extraordinary flow of talent
from the North-East states.

Looking back at the give and take that has played out so positively
over twelve editions in fourteen years, it is interesting to remember
what our two very distant locations have meant to each other at
different times. Here is what the terrific Guwahati-based novelist and
translator Mitra Phukan said in her straight-from-the-heart keynote at
GALF 2013: “Goa’s culture of inclusiveness that is so different from
what much of Assam is now going through, constantly amazes. Of course
it is nobody’s case that smaller groups, and ethnicities should be
overlooked, or swamped in any way. But in Assam today, what we are
witnessing is a sharp and terrifyingly violent fragmentation of a
once-rich mosaic that made up our totality. There seems to be no space
for dialogue, no give and take leading to meaningful discussions
between groups, as the whole entity corkscrews into small, and
unviable sections.”

Phukan said that she was glad young people from the North East were
pouring out of the region because “it is an eye-opener for these young
people to move from the stifling atmosphere of their own home states
to the invigorating air of freedom in these places [like Goa, and] it
is absolutely vital that the young and even the old move out to
experience the way other states, other regions have been moving
forward, and developing. It is important for these stifled minds to
come to a state such as Goa where literature is being written in
several different languages. Amazingly, Konkani is written in four
different scripts, yet it is the same language [and] it has been
pointed out that historically, Goans have written in thirteen
languages. And miraculously, this diversity is not divisive, for
together, these form the writings of Goa. It is sometimes said that
the uniqueness of Goans is that they understand different cultures.
Not only that. They also help others understand each other’s cultures.
To people like us, who are coming in from a region that seems to be
self-destructing, this quality, this mindset, is of immense value.”

It’s hard not to feel ashamed when you think about what happened to
India’s smallest state and its cultural footprint in the intervening
years since Phukan made those perceptive observations. As just one
part of the catastrophic misgovernance that has brought ruin to so
many different aspects of contemporary Goa, all our premier arts and
literature institutions have been wrecked to mere shadows of what they
were then. Grotesque ignorance and incompetence reigns, and every time
any politician or administrator speaks about literature, art and
culture in recent years it only induces further shame about how far we
have fallen. But here’s the twist in the tale that no one expected:
it’s not like that in Assam, or most of the rest of the North East
either. From the evidence of the vibrant, highly impressive Dibrugarh
University International Literature Festival, they are now far
outclassing us with much more signal, far less noise, and zero
ultra-vulgar propaganda of the kind that has become so ingrained in
our part of the world.

In all this, of course, Bhaiyee has been one shining exception, and
our genial and soft-spoken man of steel did Goa proud as usual, with
his robust defence of the right to freedom of expression, and the
value of literature as the best way to understand each other and
ourselves as well. He began in Assamese, to the delight of his
audience, and did not fail to mention Gaza and Ukraine, along with
technological threats that have arisen from the pursuit of artificial
intelligence. All along, he used the examples of Goa and Konkani to
elaborate on his greater points, and I found it sublimely satisfying
to sit next to Shaila Mauzo listening to Bhaiyee captivate this full
Assamese house about our tiny slice of the far-away Konkan.

Just how far away came sharply into focus as we met the international
delegates, because the festival curators did an outstanding job of
grounding the event in its cultural and geographic location. There was
an outstandingly comprehensive representation from Assam itself,
several other authors from the surrounding states, and a slew of
delegates from Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia and Vietnam. On meeting
the dynamic change-making publisher, author and translator Socheata
Huot, we discovered her hometown of Pnom Penh is almost 500 kilometres
closer to Dibrugarh than is Panjim, and her language belongs to the
Mon-Khmer family group that extends into Assam, which makes her entire
cultural milieu is much more linked there than ours.

The inaugural Dibrugarh University International Literature Festival
was absolutely great because it really did bring the world to that
tiny sun-soaked hinterland above the Brahmaputra, especially with the
presence of an entire delegation from Vietnam and two authors from
Ukraine. On the last day, in a panel on fiction chaired by me, and
including Bhaiyee and the Australian writer Kate Mildenhall, all of us
were floored by the testimony from soulful Kiev-based writer,
journalist and singer Irena Karpa, and the brave and witty critic
Quyen Nguyen from Hanoi. They compelled us to recall that writers live
in increasingly dark times everywhere, but they are much worse for
some than others, where censorship and war are omnipresent everyday
realities. Huge credit to Dhruba Hazarika and Rahul Jain and the rest
of their organisational team for that important reminder of why
literature and literature festivals matter so much, and
congratulations for their outstanding first edition of a truly lovely
new landmark on the national cultural calendar.

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