EVENT
Books all the way
ANTARA DAS
|
Despite the rain and a shift in venue, people poured in as usual at the Kolkata Book Fair this year.
|
The Fair itself became a pawn in a bigger Nature versus Culture debate, with the former arguing that it had become too big for its own good while the latter upheld the uniqueness of the Fair and its diversity.
Photo: Sushanta Patronobish
Dramatic affair: But the book lovers still turned out.
THE 32nd Kolkata Book Fair, being held between February 10 and 25, turned out to be more dramatic than any book lover would have bargained for. This annual carnival of books suddenly turned into a hotbed of controversy, with green activists protesting against the damage caused to the environment if the fair was held at its usual venue — the Maidan and the organisers — the Publishers and Book Sellers Guild — reacting with indifference and utter disregard for such concerns.
That nonchalance on the Guild's part was replaced by panic when on January 29, 2007, the Calcutta High Court ruled that the Fair would not be allowed on the Maidan, as it led to environmental degradation and that the grounds would have to be restored to their original state and returned to the custodian — the Indian Army — within seven days.
Truncated version
And so the Fair — which in public imagination had developed a spatial association with that centrally located patch of green known as the Maidan — was, for the first time in its history, shifted to the Yuvabharati Krirangan or the Salt Lake Stadium as it is more popularly known. Of course this was a truncated version to suit the space constraints of the new venue. While the number of stalls was scaled down from 900 to 650 and the overall spread reduced from 28 to seven acres, the Fair itself became a pawn in a bigger Nature versus Culture debate, with devotees of the former arguing that it had become too big for its own good while the latter upheld the uniqueness of the Fair and its diversity.
The numbers never failed to astound in the Book Fair — the 2006 fair had an estimated 2.5 million visitors according to the police — as people poured in from every part of the city, from the suburbs further away, and even from the distant districts to be part of that celebration of the written word. Detractors argued that, of late, the voracious appetite for books had been replaced by an appetite of a more earthy kind — for the range of foodstuff that the Fair had to offer. Nevertheless, the crowd thronged the Fair, enjoying the pleasures that new books offered or the exhilaration of locating a dog-eared copy of a much-desired book.
"The Maidan constitutes around 60 per cent of the open space in this city," said Subhash Dutta, an environmentalist who has been fighting for the well being of the Maidan for many years now. "The Calcutta High Court, in its 2003 ruling, had said that fairs held at the Maidan would have to be relocated, as they degrade the environmental health of this place," he added. "The air quality reached dangerous levels during the Book Fair hours, mounds of garbage and solid waste were left behind once it ended and the stomping millions destroyed the soil character of this place."
Not all agree with this contention though. "We have always been in favour of regarding the Maidan as commons, which has to be judiciously used and not preserved or showcased," said Banani Kakkar, another prominent environmentalist in the city. While air quality is drastically affected by other sources of pollution such as emission from automobiles, laying out tarpaulin or coir matting could have preserved the grass on the fair ground, Kakkar pointed out. "In fact, the Guild should have ploughed back some of the profits it made every year to the restoration of the Maidan and repaired the damage caused," said Sachin Rastogi, proprietor of Worldview, who has now set up shop at the new venue. "This is after all the largest attended fair in the world," he added.
More woes
Nature also was not particularly munificent towards the fair even at the new venue. Even as the organisers tried to hastily set up the show, it rained incessantly for three days, converting the Fair ground to a sea of slush and sending the likes of Rathin Mitra, the artist celebrated for his panoramic sketches of Kolkata, scurrying for cover. "It is chaotic here, with the book fair being held simultaneously with football matches, and rainwater seeping through and destroying the sketches," said Mitra, well into his 82nd year and associated with the Fair since its inception. "The Guild should have chalked out an alternate plan instead of rushing to the Chief Minister every time they were in a fix."
Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee personally favoured the Maidan venue, expressing his unhappiness when the venue finally shifted. "I am not able to come to terms with the decision," he said. Being a book lover, he did manage to pay a visit to the Fair at its new location.
"It is quite expensive to erect cloth and bamboo structures and dismantle them every year," said Ramesh Tiwary, proprietor of Bookline, a shop dealing in second hand books. "The Guild should arrange for a permanent venue like Pragati Maidan in Delhi that will also protect us from rain and fire hazards," he said. The move away from the central part of the city affects them all, as the lack of adequate transport facilities translates into less visitors.
What then is the essence of the Kolkata Book Fair, whose mere shift in venue led prominent city intellectuals like writer Sunil Gangopadhyay and filmmaker Mrinal Sen, among several others, to organise a symbolic protest book fair at the Maidan? As a non-trade book fair primarily aimed at the general public, it is perhaps wiser to listen to the voice of the book-loving individual. "For me, the Book Fair is deeply cultural; everywhere I go, I meet people from other parts of India and from the world who tell me that Bengalis are Bengalis because we have had our writers and our books and our renaissances. Can I let go so easily of a past, if reflected, glory?" said Debleena, a U.S.-based research student. She recounted how a visiting Fulbright professor marvelled at how "thousands of ordinary people (not scholars or students) would wait in line and pay to get in to see books".
Perhaps, as long as these ordinary people live, the spirit of the fair will survive, no matter where it is being held — as long as the fledgling writers and poets bare their souls in little magazines; as long as struggling artists in the artists' corner eagerly paint instant portraits for a pittance; as long as artists trudge all the way from remote parts of the state to display the hand-painted Patachitras on the fair ground, all the while glancing furtively at the overcast sky above.
And the fair will survive as long as that solitary man keeps appearing with his personal collection of faded, sepia-tinted news articles relating to Satyajit Ray, gathered from newspapers and magazines over the last 60 years — not to make a bargain, not to sell them to the highest bidder, but to share with others what has been his labour of love. In him resides the euphoria of the Kolkata Book Fair, in him the elegy.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Magazine
