The 15th edition of the Jaipur Literature Festival will take place between March 5-14, 2022, in its home city of Jaipur. Each year, Teamwork Arts, the festival’s producer, promotes art and world heritage through a variety of innovative initiatives at the festival. This year’s festival will also include a variety of sessions highlighting various aspects of art and culture.
Sohini Roychowdhury, a Bharatanatyam exponent, and Sharon Lowen, a renowned dancer of Indian classical dance forms — Odissi, Manipuri, Mayurbhanj, and Seraikella Chhau — will join Manjari Sinha, acclaimed music and dance critic, for a fascinating discussion on Sringara, exploring the evocative and evolutionary form. The session will look at the long history and various interpretations of Sringara, an aesthetic peak that is often regarded as the mother of all nine rasas in Indian dance.
Intriguing and vivacious stage personality Dolly Thakore, whose autobiography defies categorisation, has described her life with piercing honesty. Regrets, None, co-written with Arghya Lahiri, who has 20 years of theatre experience, is a humorous, witty, and candid look at Dolly’s eventful life. Ritu Menon, a feminist, publisher, and author, has written a theatrical biography of the remarkable actor and dancer Zohra Sehgal, who lived a full life until the age of 90. Menon explains how dancer Uday Shankar and actor Prithviraj Kapoor’s creativity influenced Sehgal. Thakore, Menon and Lahiri will discuss the essence of theatre, its genius, magic, and pervasive misogyny in conversation with Festival Producer and Managing Director of Teamwork Arts, Sanjoy K. Roy. Roy will also be in conversation with well-known Indian singer and musician Remo Fernandes during a session that will explore his pursuit of his greatest love: music, art, writing and his homeland Goa.
The festival will include a session that explores both the sensual allure of the human body and the fundamental ambiguities of its representation. Ambarish Satwik, a writer, commentator, and vascular surgeon, reflects on the distance between the naked and the nude in the anatomy of our race, even as modern imaging technologies render us asexual and transparent.
Alka Pande, a celebrated writer, curator, and historian, has examined the erotic from a variety of perspectives in her work. Pha(bu)llus, her most recent book, investigates the power of phallic symbolism as a key and recurring motif in religion, culture and art. They will talk about art and the nature of the erotic, as well as the anti-nude, in the context of the sensuous, mortal, philosophical and spiritual.
Farrukh Dhondy, a writer, screenwriter, and activist, has as many fascinating life experiences as professional accolades. Dhondy’s life is a cinematic rollercoaster, from bearing witness to pre-independence India, the Partition, and many a social movement to meeting a roster of eclectic, and even murderous, celebrities. Dhondy will discuss his life as a writer in conversation with film and theatre director Arghya Lahiri.