Report: Dehradun Literature Festival (DDLF)

In a country like India where teenagers are deprived of scientifically sound sexual health education, the Dehradun Literature Festival (DDLF) — held at Doon International School from November 8 to 10 — deserves kudos for inviting Tanaya Narendra, author of the book Everything Nobody Tells You About Your Body to talk about menstruation, age of consent, body shaming, sexual abuse, the HPV vaccine, and a whole gamut of related topics.

It was refreshing to be in an environment where students could ask questions without fear of being ridiculed by peers and teachers. The speaker, who is popularly known as Dr Cuterus on Instagram, noted that “it is important to learn and use the right anatomical terms” instead of using abominable expressions like “shame shame” to talk about body parts so that young people feel empowered to report instances of sexual abuse instead of blaming themselves. She emphasized that, while teenagers have easy access to sexual health resources on the Internet, they can be misled as “there is a lot of misinformation” masquerading as advice.

The festival, which took place on the campus in Dehradun’s Dalanwala neighbourhood, also hosted a session with Trinetra Haldar Gummaraju — a trans woman, who has been campaigning for the removal of unscientific and derogatory references about LGBTQIA+ people from medical textbooks, and creating digital content to educate society. She is also an actor, who made her debut with the hugely successful OTT show Made in Heaven.

Being mobbed by students, who look up to her and wanted her autograph, was a moving experience. Recalling her formative years, she said, “I came out at the age of 13. I used to be someone people laughed at, so to be seen as inspirational was beyond my wildest dream.” Apart from talking about other trans women such as screenwriter Gazal Dhaliwal and writer-activist A Revathi, who are her role models, she shared that she too is working on a memoir.

Queer inclusion at the festival was not tokenistic. It was carefully thought through and executed, giving the audience a chance to meet community members from different walks of life. These included K Vaishali, who won the 2024 Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar for her book Homeless: Growing Up Lesbian and Dyslexic in India and works on diversity equity and inclusion (DEI) in the corporate sector, non-binary human rights lawyer and bioethicist Rohin Bhatt, author of The Urban Elite v. Union of India: The Unfulfilled Constitutional Promise of Marriage (In)Equality, transwoman Aqsa Shaikh, a professor of community medicine and author of The Taste of Tears, and Kinshuk Gupta, author, Yeh Dil Hai Ki Chordarwaja.

While a large number of students were present, there were many adults too. “It is important to strike a balance between what Dehradun wants and what Dehradun needs. One has to pander but also educate. Once you manage to bring people in, you can also serve them something new and experimental,” said festival director Saumya Kulshreshtha. In its sixth edition, the festival had “Sahitya, Cinema, Samaaj” (literature, cinema, society) as its theme with sessions on travel writing, feminism, cultural heritage, wellness, love legends, wildlife conservation, oral narratives, costume design in period films, and India’s place in a shifting world order. These were conducted in English, Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi.

Samraant Virmani, founder of the festival, who grew up in a business family, set up a school and runs an event management company, said, “Dehradun has some of the best educational institutions in the country, and the general public here is well educated. We wanted to give our audience a mix of sessions that would be thought-provoking, deep and meaningful.”

The panel discussion on children’s literature had Neha Singh, author of the picture book I Need to Pee, open up about how adults make children feel embarrassed and ashamed of their bodies and biological processes. The book revolves around Rahi, a girl who enjoys beverages and has a tough time finding safe and clean public toilets while travelling with her family.

Singh said, “The book grew out of my own experience with a bus driver on a 17-hour bus ride. He was unwilling to stop for me when I badly needed to pee.” The lack of sensitivity was startling. She was able to put her foot down but the incident made her think from a child’s point of view since “it is not always possible for them to ask for what they need.”

Author Ashwitha Jayakumar, who collaborated with illustrator Nikhil Gulati on The Book of Emperors: An Illustrated History of the Mughals, debunked popular misconceptions including “the story of Shah Jahan ordering the hands of workers being chopped off to prevent anyone from making such a beautiful building again”. Stating that there is no evidence to support this, she added that it was quite likely that the same artisans would have worked on the emperor’s next great building project — the city of Shahjahanabad.

She highlighted the role of colonial historians in cementing “the orientalist fantasy” of the harem as “a place existing purely for the emperor’s sexual gratification, where the women had little or no agency.” She countered this with examples of royal and aristocratic Mughal women who owned property, were well educated, acted as advisors and regents for their male relatives, ran successful business ventures, travelled a lot, and plotted assassinations.

Revealing that she enjoyed the research process, she added that she especially relished the family drama that emerged from Mughal letters. “For me, the great joy of history has always been in the shock of discovering common threads between the people of the past and ourselves, in relishing their joys, sorrows and fears, and in attempting to see their world as they saw it,” she said.

Lady Kishwar Desai, who chairs the board of trustees for the Partition Museum in Amritsar and the Partition Museum in Delhi, deepened the conversation on how to engage with history. A significant number of the museums’ visitors are school groups brought by teachers and principals. She remarked, “I disagree with the view that the Partition brings up only memories of pain. People lost their homes and loved ones but they also talk about how communities helped each other escape from difficult circumstances. We find narratives where people who have returned to pre-Partition homes have been received with love.”

Desai, who has also a written a play based on the life of author Saadat Hasan Manto, said: “If we remember only the pain, how will we ever find resolution, move forward? We need to bridge the divides that exist, and recover our shared culture. It is important to understand the Partition to make sense of our current realities.”

Moving from collective pain to pain of a more personal nature, the festival included a heartfelt session featuring actor Sandhya Mridul who released Untamed, her debut collection of poems dedicated to her deceased brother. “I had this image of being a bold, bad-ass chick not only in other people’s eyes but also my own. While writing this book, I had to learn to own my fragility,” she said. Actor Shabana Azmi who joined her for the book launch said, “Among friends, Sandhya is always the joker making everyone laugh. Reading her poems, I saw a completely different side — a woman who was vulnerable.”

Instead of limiting itself to the written word, the Dehradun Literature Festival also celebrated the tradition of oral storytelling. While Sajid Ali, who directed and wrote the screenplay for the 2018 Hindi film Laila Majnu spoke at the festival, storyteller Laksh Maheshwari’s live performance was greatly appreciated for bringing the characters alive on stage and making the audience experience the ecstasy and agony of the star-crossed lovers.

“The love story of Laila-Majnu goes back to the seventh century,” said Maheshwari. “It has earned the status of a legend because it is so powerful and has travelled widely across regions and languages but the seed lies in incidents that actually took place in the Arabian Peninsula.”

The story appealed to him because “it is structured around the seven stages of love: dilkashi, uns, mohabbat, aqeedat, ibaadat, junoon, and maut”. “When love travels through these stages, it brings the lover closer not only to the beloved but also to God,” he added.

The festival made a conscious effort to expand the definition of what is considered literature by including a panel on screenwriting entitled Women Writing Women: Owning our stories, that featured Leena Yadav, Sutapa Sikdar and Atika Chohan. Drawing attention to the limited ways in which male writers depict women characters, they shed light on their own craft.

Yadav prefers social interaction over solitude while writing because meeting people gives her a lot of useful ideas to fine tune her characters. Chohan adopts a writing process akin to the riyaaz that musicians do, and enjoys labouring away quietly on drafts instead of being fixated on the final outcome. Sikdar devours Bengali literature for inspiration. “I love to read Nabarun Bhattacharya, Ashapurna Debi, Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee. That’s why my writing is not Bollywoody,” she said.

Speakers like Jerry Pinto, Salman Khurshid, Rajit Kapur, Penaz Masani, Manraj Patar, Anupama Chopra, Wasim Barelvi, Himanshu Bajpai, Anita Mani, Bikram Grewal, Aditi Maheshwari Goyal, and Abhinav Bindra offered audience members much to think about.

The festival also gave away awards named after prominent writers from its home state of Uttarakhand. While Manjula Rana from Garhwal Central University got the ‘Shivani — The Iron Lady of the Hills’ Award for her contributions to literature, Angel Srivastava Agrawal won the ‘Ruskin Bond Literary Award’ in the Promising Writer category and Adwaid Deepak got it in the Budding Writer category. Sadly, Bond, who is much loved by people of all ages, could not be there to meet his fans. “He has been very supportive. Despite his poor health, he read the entries and selected the winners,” said Virmani.

Chintan Girish Modi writes on books, art and culture. He can be reached @chintanwriting on Instagram and X.