Manorama Hortus opens in Kochi with call for global togetherness

The second edition of Manorama Hortus, which has unity (The Power of We) as its theme, came to life on Thursday at the intersection of literature and freedom struggle in Kochi.

To the west of the Rajendra Maidan, where the main venue ‘Kurinji’ is situated, is the Kochi lake. The lake is associated with the history of Malayalam literature in two ways, one as a creative triumph and the other as a tragedy.

"In 1903, it is this lake that became the backdrop for Malayalam's second short story 'Oru Muthala Nayattu'," said writer N S Madhavan, the festival director of Manorama Hortus, while delivering the keynote address that marked the official start of the four-day festival at Rajendra Maidan.

The lake intervened a second time when Ponjikkara Rafi was travelling in a boat from Bolgatty Palace carrying the written manuscript of 'Swargadoothan', Malayalam's first 'stream of consciousness' novel that was inspired by James Joyce's radical new literary form that found its most exalted embodiment in ‘Ulysses'. "Rafi's manuscript fell into this lake. It took another two years for Rafi to rewrite the novel," Madhavan said.

If the lake evokes literary nostalgia, the very ground on which the main Hortus venue stands has a strong connection to India's freedom struggle. "The original name of this place was Saleme's Mount, named after A B Salem. Salem, who later came to be known as the Jewish Gandhi, had this habit of reaching this place daily from Kochi in a boat, standing on a small sand mound and delivering passionate freedom speeches. It was Saleme's Mount that became Rajendra Maidan," Madhavan said.

If the ambience is redolent with cultural and political history, Madhavan said that the theme of the second Manorama Hortus (Me-You-We: The Power of We) is inspired by the thinking of three philosophers.

One is Donna Jeanne Haraway. "She destroyed the boundaries that separated humans, animals and machines and put forward a new concept called cyborgs. Her manifesto revolutionised thinking worldwide," Madhavan said, hinting at a festival that would want to explore a world where technology is acquiring a scary supremacy and the desertion of the environment no longer a choice.

This is how festival curator Bandhu Prasad articulated Haraway's influence on the festival. "Haraway’s call to 'stay with the trouble' refuses dominion and innocence, insisting on situated response-ability and multispecies alliances that do not harm, exploit, or erase," he said.

Further inspiration came from Sree Narayana Guru. "It was he who gave the revolutionary message of global unity: 'One Caste, One Religion, One God'," Madhavan said. Festival curator Prasad said that Narayana Guru furnished the ethical core of non-harm, dignity, and radical equality, articulating a social and spiritual grammar that rejected hierarchy and reconstituted bonds through compassion and justice.

More inspiration came from Vaikom Muhammad Basheer. "For him, there was no difference between man and other living organisms. He once said that man existed to quench the mosquitoes' thirst for blood," Madhavan said. He said that Basheer had penned 'Bhoomiyude Avakashikal' in 1940, long before environmental awareness emerged in the world.

Prasad articulated Basheer's concept of oneness this way: "He offers the everyday technique of this ethic— an intimate realism that nurses one’s joys and wounds, holds contradiction with humour and tenderness, and crafts sanity within turbulence."

Malayala Manorama's editorial director Jose Panachippuram spoke of the Hortus theme as perhaps the ultimate social aspiration. "There are multiple kinds of divisive tendencies in our world today. Behind the Hortus theme is the thinking that 'me' and 'you' should get subsumed in the larger 'we'," Panachippuram said.

He said that Hortus would attempt to explore not just literature but also the countless cultural shades of the new generation.