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

Hindi film songs

"The item song is like a monkey on a madari's shoulder. It comes, performs and goes while the madari might be a seller of kajal and have nothing to do with the monkey and its performance."

So said Javed Akhtar at a session on January 25 on the evolution of Hindi film songs.

The session titled Songs for all Reasons also featured Balaji Vittal and Anirudha Bhattacharjee, authors of Gaata Rahe Mera Dil: 50 Classic Hindi Film Songs, and was moderated by Shovon Chowdhury.

The authors have picked songs from 1938 to 1993 that not only trace the evolution of Hindi films down the years but also reflect the evolution of the taste of the audience. "It's history of India in 50 songs," as Chowdhury put it.

Highlighting the importance of songs in films, Akhtar spoke about how songs earlier were an integral part of the plot and how they helped propel the plot forward. Songs then had a lesson to impart (a case in point would be Raj Kapoor's Kisi ki muskurahaton ko le udhaar from Anari), gave voice to true emotions and often revealed the weaker side of man, his loneliness and his estrangement.

Akhtar mourned how the new generation has created an atmosphere of "false bravado and exuberance" because they hate to show their weaker side and prefer to dismiss older films and songs as "sentimental". He acceded that older films and songs were sentimental but also pointed out that the younger generation, in trying not to be sentimental, has gone to another extreme and become superficial.

From the idealism and positivism of the 1930s and the 1940s, the talk moved to the 1960s with O.P. Nayyar's songs and their trademark sound of horse hooves, to the 1970s that saw songs such as Zindagi ka safar, Dum maro dum and finally to Aap jaisa koi mera zindagi mein aaye from the 1980s.

For Akhtar, the 1980s were also the beginning of the end. Because with the emergence of the new semi-literate middle class in the 1980s, there came about a change in taste, aesthetics and morality. This was underlined by Sadkailo khatiya jada lagey being a resounding hit.

The session concluded with Akhtar reciting Mein Banjara on Balaji Vittal's request.

People's war

People's war is never fully over. It may peter out for a while, only to resurface in a different form, at a different time.

That was the sense one got from the lively exchange at the Sunil Gangopadhyay Memorial Session on January 24.

Novelists Samaresh Majumdar, Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay and Kunal Basu recounted the tumultuous Naxalite years in a discussion moderated by writer Swapnamoy Chakraborty. The conversation began with ruminations about the term, "Naxalgia", which was also the title of the session.

Drawing a parallel between the politics of the 1970s and the present Maoist struggle, Chakraborty reminded the audience that while the former still evoked a sense of yearning for a failed class revolution, the ongoing Maoist insurgency invited only repulsion.

Majumdar recounted his experience of writing the cult classic, Kaalbela, a book that sold more than one lakh copies and gave readers the iconic character, Animesh. He admitted that while he accepted some aspects of the revolutionary ideology of the Naxalites, he, too, was guilty of making money by peddling the nostalgia associated with the movement.

Basu shared how the research for his latest novel, Kalkatta, required him to interview some junior colleagues of Naxalite-era police officers such as Ranjit Kumar Gupta and Runu Guha Niyogi. Basu acknowledged that although the violent streak of Naxalite politics might have been wrong, yet it was, unlike the current student politics, absolutely selfless.

Mukhopadhyay spoke about his experiences of being a schoolteacher at that time. Repeated disruptions during the school hours and mindless acts of violence against individuals identified as "class enemies" were common. While he appreciated the raw courage of the young rebels, he thought that the movement lost its momentum mainly because of its faulty leadership.

Indira & Emergency

Ashok Malik, Kiran Nagarkar and Sunanda K. Datta-Ray came together to talk about the summer of 1975 at a session titled Emergency @ 40 on January 25.

Given that existing narratives of the Emergency indicate that the regime emerged from a series of related events, could Datta-Ray sense it coming? "When Indira Gandhi lost the Allahabad high court case, we knew she would do something drastic," he said. "... something within the bounds of the law, but I cannot pretend that I expected the precise manner in which she went about saving her job. The Emergency gave her absolute power to do what she wanted."

Historian Rudrangshu Mukherjee, who moderated the session, pointed out a train of thought, particularly among the armed forces, about India's dire need of a "strong government". Where does one draw the line between a "strong" government and the kind that ruled during the Emergency?

"There is always a search for an authoritative government, but that does not mean the same thing as an authoritarian government, which is what we got between 1975-77," said Malik. "Mrs Gandhi could impose Emergency because we were essentially an autarchic economy. Today we are far more linked to the world."

Is a state of Emergency difficult to impose now? Malik felt "it would be far more difficult to maintain now", and Datta-Ray added: "Maintenance is a different matter... the instincts and provisions within the law are there, but our integration into the global economy makes it much more difficult."

Nagarkar, whose play Bedtime Story, was legally and extra-legally banned in Maharashtra, said: "There is a subterranean yearning among people for a strong man or woman at the top; I cannot dismiss this incredible belief easily, that a strong person at the helm will automatically make things better. I doubt if any sort of education can ever get rid of this notion."

If a Prime Minister cuts through the tension between the centralising forces and the more federal forces represented by the states, and concentrates power in his own hands, can he emerge as an authoritative/authoritarian figure? "This was true in 1975; it is not easy to concentrate power in the Centre now," said Malik. "The search for a strongman has been transferred from Delhi to the states. Our most successful chief ministers are all mini-dictators."

"Senator Adlai Stevenson once told me, 'You are proud of your democracy, but what you really have is a representative government; we in America have democracy.' That, I think, is right," concluded Datta-Ray.

Compiled by Shafia Parveen, Ratnabir Guha and Nayantara Mazumder