From the heart of Hyderabad in Saifabad and Begumpet, the Hyderabad Lit Fest is set to move to Sattva Knowledge City on the other side of Durgam Cheruvu for its 14th edition. The lit fest will be from January 26 to 28.
It was earlier hosted at the Hyderabad Public School and later at the Vidyaranya School, both buildings connected to the nobility of Nizam’s dominions.
Now, it will be hosted at Cyberabad, an area surrounded by tech companies and pulses with the energy of the young people flitting in and out of offices, coffee shops and a space that looks like the proscenium of a play.
“The move was necessary as the number of visitors had increased, and we realised that hosting it there (Vidyaranya School) with a functioning Secretariat would have been a nightmare for parking as well as for navigating to the location,” said director of the festival T. Vijay Kumar.
It was Vijay Kumar, who used to teach at Osmania University, who began the Hyderabad Literary Festival in 2010 with Surya Rao, who edited an online magazine. The hosting site was at the Green Park Hotel, a cultural evening and the grand stage of Osmania University Centre for International Programmes (earlier known as American Studies Research Centre) between December 10 and 12 of 2010.
“Are you interested in Indian Literature? Would you like to meet Indian, American and European writers and interact with them? In short, are you a literature lover?” were some of the words to bring literature lovers to the festival in 2010. More than a decade later, the festival has come into its own without being a clone of any other lit fest in the country.
“The turning point, I think, was in 2014, when we used multiple venues of Road No. 8 Banjara Hills for a literary event. The whole area from Aashiana to Kalpa School and Saptaparni, Kalakriti Art Gallery and Lamakaan was used for hosting art events, performances, reading sessions and books. We tried to look beyond books involving various other forms of cultural representation,” says Amita Desai, who is part of the team that works behind the scenes for the festival.
In 2015, the festival was hosted at the Hyderabad Public School, a building that began as an educational institution for the children of nobility known as jagirdars. In 2020, it moved to Vidyaranya School, a building which was part of the Wanaparthy Samasthanam.
“Now, the literary festival has become a platform for dialogues, conversation, learning and experiencing. It has taken the growth of life and letters to a different plateau. We have expanded the scope of what it means to be a literary festival,” says Ms. Desai.
True to this belief, the festival is changing with the times. “There are three new streams added to the festival. We have ‘Climate Conversations’, ‘Science’ and ‘Endangered and Indigenous languages’. We need to have conversations about climate as well as science. We thought there has to be a platform for these things where people can have a dialogue,” said Vijay Kumar.
