President Pranab Mukherjee will inaugurate the 88th edition of Nikhil Bharat Banga Sahitya Sammelan's national literary meet at the mega sports complex in Hotwar, Ranchi, on January 10, 2016.
Sharing this with the media at a Ranchi hotel, the Sahitya Sammelan's national general secretary Jayanta Ghosh said governor Droupadi Murmu and chief minister Raghubar Das would also attend the inaugural event.
"He (President Pranab Mukherjee) was closely associated with our organisation for over two decades and was also its national president for 12 terms," Ghosh said, indicating that this would be a sort of reunion, albeit a brief one, for many old Sahitya Sammelan members.
The three-day meet will attract 1,500 delegates from across India, including a host of literary and cultural personalities. Literary sessions will be addressed by Desh editor Harsha Datta, novelist Tilottama Majumdar and poet Binayak Bandyopadhyay. Prasar Bharti CEO Jawhar Sircar and film personalities Suman Mukherjee and Arindam Roy Chowdhury will also attend the meet.
"A literary conference that also has a session on the literature of neighbouring states, the event can surely help forge unity among the people of eastern India and work as a forum for the region's economic development," said food and civil supplies minister Saryu Roy, who addressed the media as the patron-in-chief of this event's reception committee.
"It is being held for the first time in Ranchi after Jharkhand's formation, though Jamshedpur, Koderma and Chaibasa have hosted it since," minister Roy added. Old-timers of Ranchi would remember that the Sahitya Sammelan's meet was held in Ranchi in December 1983 when it was a part of Bihar.
The Bengali literary organisation had an illustrious beginning in 1922.
Set up as Prabasi Banga Sahitya Sammelan, its first national meet in Varanasi in 1922 was presided over by Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore and organised by the likes of Atul Prasad Sen and Kedar Nath Bandyopadhyay. After Independence, the outfit was renamed Nikhil Bharat Banga Sahitya Sammelan.
In 1983, journalist Tushar Kanti Ghosh presided over the meet in Ranchi while towering men of letters such as Shakti Chattopadhyay, Nirendra Nath Chakraborty and Sunil Gangopadhyay had attended it.
