Kolkata Book Fair, Part 1

Welcome to Kolkata's Book Fair, two weeks of all things literary on our ever-shrinking planet. Each photograph is accompanied by a brief commentary, giving you a sense of the history behind each scene. Here's the first shot: 

This shows the last moment of the Fair's pre-production phase. While the grounds were officially open to visitors, many kiosks were half-complete and lots of last-minute fixes were taking place, such as the painting of the walkways shown above. Many of the manual and service-sector workers in Kolkata bear the marks of grievous poverty on their bodies, but you will find them doing their jobs with great skill and remarkable dignity.

This is just one of the innumerable musical performances which take place during the Fair. Kolkata is a special place -- a city of artists and intellectuals, refugees and natives, dissidents and survivors of the planetary nightmare of maritime colonialism as well as the equally violent pangs of postcolonial nation-state formation.

Here's one of the main exhibits, showcasing India's quest for national literacy and education (the structure is actually a building which contains a kiosk inside). It's easy to forget in 2018 that India was only 15% literate in 1947, with a life expectancy of 33, a tiny industrial base, almost no universities or college students, and an economy ravaged by 300 years of colonial despoliation. During the twenty-eight years between 1943 and 1971, Bengalis suffered the hammer-blows of the Great Famine, Partition, and the Bangladesh War of Liberation. They responded to this hellstorm with a blend of urban energy, rural adaptability, cosmopolitan irreverence and indigenous creativity unlike anywhere else on the planet (the closest parallel may be Ukraine's Kiev).

This is an exhibit of the West Bengal Library Extension service, bringing education and literacy to Bengalis. Bengali is one of the least appreciated and most overlooked languages on the planet, with approximately two hundred and fifty million speakers in India's federal state of West Bengal and the nation of Bangladesh and one of the most remarkable literary traditions on the planet.

Here's one of the musical performances in the central plaza. Note the ingenious fence of giant pencils, and the combination of history-soaked music and high-tech sound equipment. This is extremely typical of India: the world's newest technologies crash into the world's oldest cultures, and the result is the sort of creativity you will not find anywhere else on the planet.