Aligarh Muslim University Literature festival 2019 begins on an inspiring note

The inaugural session began with a lecture by Siddharth Varadarajan, the founding editor of ‘The Wire.in’ an independent media house in India, who spoke on the restrictions put on media and the democratic spaces inside university campuses by the ruling party. He shared his experience of his first visit to AMU in 2002 after the Gujarat massacre when he felt entire University was under siege. He said, “Universities are under siege and we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be overcome with gloom and doom because we are here, we are discussing this, we are pointing it out and we are resisting it.”

He also said in his lecture that we are presently passing through a phase where politics and the language of politics is militarised.  Educational institutions are being attacked and continuously provoked so that the very idea of a University is squashed.

“You don’t even have 'reporting' anymore, we just have gladiatorial contests now”, he said while talking about the current position of media.  He went on to talk about the defamation cases filed on The Wire.in in the three years of its existence, are worth 11,000 crores. He says that “A well-functioning media is a guarantor of accountability and transparency.”

Sympathizing with the recent series of events in AMU, he said, “Sedition and treason are used synonymously today.” He mentioned Sagarika Ghose and other such women who have dared to raise their voices against the ruling party and said, “To be a woman and have strong opinions requires nerves of steel.”

He concluded his talk with the note that the ruling regime fears and attacks universities because ‘best universities produce best minds and the best minds believe in debate, they believe in challenging orthodoxy, they believe in questioning’. He added that he came to AMU to be inspired, and he is inspired and he will be inspired.

This is the 5th edition of the AMU Litfest. The students of the university claim that this is the only literary festival in India organized only by students without any corporate sponsorship. In another panel on ‘the relevance of literary festivals’, known poet Jaishree Misra congratulated the students and said, “It is absolutely fantastic that AMU runs its literary festival without sponsorship”.

The panel on the relevance of literary festival had Sahitya Academy winner author Jerry Pinto and known Urdu critic Shafey Kidwai. Speaking on the issue of corporate funding, Jerry Pinto was attending the AMU Literary Festival because it takes no corporate funding unlike other mainstream literary festivals across India.

Speaking in the third panel was Asghar Wajahat, well-known novelist and scriptwriter, narrated four different stories centred around issues like gender, right-wing organizations hailing killers of Mahatma Gandhi, and mob lynchings.

The first day of the three-day long literary festival ended with a musical performance by the students.