Highlights of some of the events at Tata Steel Kolkata Literary Meet, in association with Victoria Memorial and The Telegraph

Painting upkeep

Conservation of paintings and art work, being "self-effacing" and "anonymous" earlier, did not have many takers.

However, it is becoming more interesting, and what was once a trade is turning into a profession as the conservator's job involves ethics, art history and cultural context, said Rupert Featherstone, director, Hamilton Kerr Institute and assistant director, conservation, Fitzwilliam Museum.

Featherstone has spent three years working in Calcutta as chief restorer of the Calcutta Tercentenary Trust's programme of conservation and education in the Victoria Memorial Hall.

He was in conversation with Jayanta Sengupta, secretary and curator of the Hall, on Tuesday afternoon. The subject of the conversation was changed from smart cities and museums to conservation at the last moment for lack of time.

Sengupta asked Featherstone why the Hall collection was chosen for the conservation project.

Featherstone said the Hall collection with its Daniells and Zoffany, particularly the oils, is "absolutely unique" and a lot of the material was beginning to break down. It was a "rescue operation" but they also had a thought for the future and trained the Hall staff.

The paintings were treated "as fully as we could". They discovered new signatures and dates, and that the paintings were "actually lively" and not as dull as they looked.

They also discovered that Daniells' paintings done in India were "so much more alive" than those done in the UK. They gave the West the first glimpse of the Taj, and that was the beginning of the "visual appreciation" of India.

At the end of the dialogue, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, director, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, contended that after the restoration project, the Hall did little follow up after 1990, to raise public awareness about the collection's worth.

Featherstone sounded the warning that oils are not safe in the UK either, for unless the weather is stable, all oils stand the chance of getting damaged. He was also against the use of new technology for the sake of using new technology if the older methods worked better. Conserving paintings in a historic building like Victoria is as much a problem here as it is abroad.

In reply to Sengupta's question, Featherstone said conservators occasionally make "surprising discoveries" about the authenticity of a painting. If a "Caravaggio" turns out to be a fake it loses its monetary value. The conservator works like a detective scrutinising paint and wood for investigation.

Epic and diplomacy

Father-son duo of Sunanda K. Datta-Ray and Deep K. Datta-Ray got together with Leonard Gordon on Sunday to discuss Deep's book The Making of Indian Diplomacy: A Critique of Eurocentrism, which argues that the Mahabharat shaped the thinking of Indian diplomacy and still influences the mental universe of Indian diplomats, and which the senior Datta-Ray described as having "provoked unintentional controversy".

The Sunday session began with an elaborate introduction to the book through quotes from a series of reviews - Satyabrata Pal reportedly called the book "an elaborate hoax", while Krishnan Srinivasan said it was the "result of impressive research".

What does the author think is special about his book? "My book has several USPs," said Deep, who used to be a business consultant. "I am the only outsider to have done field work within a foreign ministry anywhere in the world. The reason for that is simple; no bureaucracy likes an outsider, noting down their foibles, seeing what they do, or not do. This is the only book based on field work."

"The purpose of the book is to figure out why India conducts diplomacy the way in which it does," the author continued. "I do not talk about what I think India should do. I have tried to record what Indian diplomats and their masters - the foreign minister at any point in time, and the Prime Minister of course - think India should do, and more importantly why India should operate its foreign policy in that manner. I managed to do that by spending a lot of time with them."

The idea of us all being interconnected, "rooted in the Mahabharat", is the core idea that guides Indian diplomats, according to Deep. "Mani Shankar Aiyar once said to me, 'You cannot think of Indian diplomats the way foreigners do... I am from the South, but I do not think of myself as such because I grew up in Delhi.' It is these ideas that make Indian diplomacy unique; these ideas cannot be explained in European theories."

Partition pangs

In an interview, not on cricket but his memories of the Partition, former Pakistani cricketer Intikhab Alam talked about the bloodbath he had witnessed - of women lying with heads missing, men without legs. Alam's wife sat quietly in the room as he spoke. All of a sudden, she burst out: "Seven men from my family were martyred. The women jumped into wells." And lapsed into silence again.

A hush fell over the audience at Victoria Memorial as Pakistani researcher Anam Zakaria recounted the experience of conducting the interview. "Many women had never talked about what they had seen. One women I interviewed fainted afterwards," she recounted, speaking at a session on Partition through the eyes of women.

Zakaria pointed out how there was a difference in perception of the Partition on either side of the border. "In India, because Pakistan is seen as a loss, there is grief. But in Pakistan you don't have that space as even in school text books, Partition is seen as a victory. If you express too much grief at the national level, you are questioning the two-nation theory," she said at a session last Friday.

"The effect of the Partition was felt on every family. My parents were Indians at first, then they were Pakistanis, then they became Bangladeshis. My grandfather's house in Ballygunge Park was taken away. Everyone was a victim, even the perpetrators. I spoke to someone who was told to kill children. Even now, he can't discuss what he did with his family, neither can he forget. Assigning blame is not easy," said Bangladeshi writer Farah Ghuznavi.

Pakistani academic Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar pointed out that the minority question that the Partition was supposed to resolve never really got resolved.

"When citizenship laws were being drafted, no one knew who was Indian and who was Pakistani. People were on the move and where they ended up was often not of their choosing."

Srijit Mukherji, whose film Rajkahini has the Partition as its backdrop, pointed out that Indians have not drilled the memory of the Partition into their collective consciousness as the West has done with the Holocaust.

"Be it Godhra or any riot, we tend to brush things under the carpet and the only question raised is who started it."

Moderator Ratnaboli Ray brought up the women who were abducted and raped and many of whom refused to come back to their families or the family couldn't cope when they returned. "Women's bodies became a battleground and a way to desecrate the other country was to desecrate its women," Mukherji said. "Not enough work has been done to recover the women's voice in these choices," Zakaria signed off.

Reporting by Soumitra Das, Nayantara Majumdar and Sudeshna Banerjee