Sankha Ghosh inaugurates Bengali literary meet

Jnanpith awardee Sankha Ghosh on Friday inaugurated the three-day 'Appejay Bangla Sahitya Utsav', being held at Rabindranath Tagore's birth place Jorasanko, here. A five-member team of poets and writers from Bangladesh is taking part in the event.

Tridib Chatterjee, whose Patra Bharati is one of the organisers of the meet, said a distinct flavour this year is the visit of five eminent authors-publishers from Bangladesh, "the only country in the world with Bengali as its national language." He said this year the 'Utsav' has curated specific session to pay tribute to late Bengali writer and academic Nabaneeta Dev Sen and observe 200th birth anniversary of social reformer Pandit Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar. There will be 23 specially curated sessions on topics such as heritage, poetry, music during the literary festival, entirely themed on Bengali literature, art and music being held in the courtyard of 'Jorasanko Thakurbari', he said.

Bangladeshi writer-columnist Majharul Islam said people of Bangladesh don't know many new-age Bengali writers from Dhaka and this is equally true regarding the knowledge of people of West Bengal about several new-age writers from Dhaka. "This festival, to celebrate the literary heritage of Bengali language spoken in both countries, will act as a bridge," he said.

Popular Bengali writer Pracheto Gupta said the Bengali writers of the two countries have crossed the boundaries of geography and language through their works. During one-of-a-kind literary discussion on the inaugural day of the meet, jointly organised by Oxford Book Store, there was a discussion among different Facebook Page Groups about promoting new-age Bangla literature in social media and a panel discussion tracing the evolution of Bangla magazines to webzines.

The discussion was titled 'Little Magazine Theke Webzine- Cholar Pothe Chine Nin' (the journey from little magazines to web journals) with eminent writers from little magazine Tapash Bhowmick (Korok), Prasun Bhowmick (Bijalpa), Debjyoti Bhattacharya (Joydhak), Dipankar Choudhury (Parobash) taking part..

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