A beloved fixture on the calendars of the city’s poetry lovers, this year, Bengaluru Poetry Festival (BPF) has reached a milestone its founders perhaps did not imagine when they started off. “It’s a proud moment for all of us that we’ve somehow managed to reach 10 years with the support of the people of Bengaluru,” smiles Subodh Sankar, who founded the festival with Lakshmi Sankar.
The festival will return on August 1 and 2, taking place under the cool canopy of Indiranagar Sangeetha Sabha’s 200-year-old trees. To mark the decennial, this edition’s lineup will be ‘a celebration of linguistic diversity,’ notes Sankar, elaborating, “Bengaluru being such a multicultural, multilingual cosmopolitan city, is the inspiration behind trying this. We’ve been trying our hardest to bring in representation from as many languages from as many parts of this country as possible.” This lineup of poets writing in languages like Kannada, Naga, Bodo, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Tamil, Malayalam, Urdu and Hindi has been curated over the course of a year, with special attention towards younger poets, including Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar winners.
Among the big names gracing the stage this year is Bengaluru’s own Prakash Raj, whose connection with poetry goes beyond his iconic lines in Iruvar. “He’s someone who not just loves poetry, but also writes poetry and is committed to the art form. He’s going to do a banger of a session on the poetry that inspires him,” says Sankar. Another is the popular mythologist Devdutt Pattnaik, who will take visitors into the world of India’s ancient poetry. Sankar explains, “He’s going to talk about metres, verses and the history of poetry that comes from our own 5,000 to 6,000 year-old poetry tradition going back to the Rig Veda.”
A major draw at BPF each year is its performances, and this year brings dramatised readings of Kalidasa’s Meghaduta in English and Sanskrit, a session by city-based dancer Deepthi Sudhindra on how audiences can become true Rasikas, deeply receptive to the arts, a performance by Delhi-based hasya kavi, Mahesh Garg ‘Bedhadak’, blending satire and poetry, among others. One of them, Nine – Our Circle of Nines, blends poetry, movement and music, a performance where two artistes meet and move in tandem. Sankar shares, “One very interesting performance we have is by the well-known Bharatanatyam dancer Rajashree Warrier who has collaborated with poet Anupama Raju. They’ve taken Raju’s book of poetry called Nine and converted it into a performance piece.”
