'Tis the Season of Literary Events – And Censorship (thewire.in)
Just last week, on February 24, veteran Hindi writer Ashok Vajpeyi said in a social media post that he had been invited to a poetry event titled ‘Arth – The Culture Fest’ in Delhi that weekend, where he had to recite his poems in a session called ‘Kavita Sandhya’. But, Vajpeyi said, the organisers forbade him from reading poems that were political in nature or critical of the government. He refused to attend the event, saying, “This kind of censor[ship] is unacceptable.”
Early in February, as the Vidarbha Sahitya Sammelan was being organised in Uttar Pradesh’s Nagpur, journalist and author Ashutosh Bhardwaj had said in a tweet that the sponsors were allegedly “warned” by some local groups against some of the authors invited to the conference. The organisers eventually asked four of them – Aakar Patel, Josy Joseph, Shruti Ganapatey and Shivam Shankar Singh – to withdraw.
01/03/2023
