Chennai’s DakshinaChitra Museum hosts a festival of language and culture

Experience a cultural celebration at LangFest 2024, exploring language, biographies, and autobiographies at DakshinaChitra Museum.

‘Tis the season of literature fests. As bibliophiles travel around the country, ticking lit fests off their bucket list, a quieter two-day curation at DakshinaChitra Heritage Museum celebrates everything that connects language and culture. An annual affair, this year’s LangFest is bigger, and hopes to welcome a younger audience to engage with storied culture set in the backdrop of a living museum. 

Every year, the festival looks at language as a lens through which one can understand cultural narratives. To that end, this year’s theme impinges on biographies and autobiographies. 

“We are a museum of houses, so personal stories, biographies and life stories are already embedded into the museum’s point of view. This year, we thought we’ll use the idea of biography, autobiography and memoirs to understand processes, insights and the creative fount of information,” says Anitha Pottamkulam, director — culture at DakshinaChitra Museum, who also is the curator of the festival. 

Day 1 begins with lighting designer, photographer, filmmaker, poet, and founder of Seagull Publishers, Naveen Kishore in conversation with the Editor of Frontline, Vaishna Roy on the topic, Life Stories as Cultural Narratives. “This session will be very interesting because Naveen is also doing a performance that he has devised around the topic,” says Anitha, adding, “We have Urvasi [Butalia] of Zubaan and Meena [Kandasamy] talking about women writing their lives and what it means when your community starts writing or gets a voice, and the larger effect of it.” Another session on Multiple Inheritances will have Aniruddha Knight in conversation with the curator. 

The day is slated to end with the Tamil adaptation of a play by Pallava king Mahendravarman I by Chennai Kalai Kuzhu titled Mattavilasa Prahasanam. “It’s unusual because it is a satirical play,” says Anitha. 

Day 2 begins with a performance by musician and professor Vijay Karthikeyan and Prakash Ilayaraja. The session I am an Ordinary Man will have the author discuss the book, which compiles Gandhi’s writings on life after his return to India, edited by Gopal Krishna Gandhi. Another panel discussion will discuss the impact of biographies, memoirs and autobiographies in Tamil featuring Ma. Rajendran, Kamarajan K and Sandhya Natarajan. This panel will be moderated by Kavitha Muralidharan. 

“Another important session is the one with Dr Nikita Mehra where we are looking at the biography of an institution. We often don’t think of institutions as having the capacity, the need or the importance. Here, she looks at the life of the Adyar Cancer Institute (WIA) through three people,” Anitha adds. The following panel will have Jahnavi Phalkey, founding director, Science Gallery Bengaluru in conversation with AS Panneerselvan, fellow at Roja Muthiah Research Library about Scientific Lives and Modern India.