INDIA: Over three thoughtfully curated evenings at the 2026 Jaipur Literature Festival, literature emerged as a shared cultural terrain where borders softened and languages leaned toward one another. Presented by the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Austrian Embassy in New Delhi, and the Ukrainian Embassy in New Delhi under the framework of Austrian–Ukrainian Cultural Cooperation, the programme foregrounded literature as a living response to uncertainty, displacement, and resilience.
Rather than treating writing as escape or ornament, the sessions positioned it as an active witness to history and upheaval, capable of resisting erasure while imagining futures beyond present conflict. Across conversations and readings, writers reflected on how words carry memory, negotiate identity, and preserve complexity in unsettled times.
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The programme opened with The Geography of Belonging, a conversation between Austrian writer Andreas Unterweger and Indian graphic novelist and cultural commentator Sarnath Banerjee, moderated by Swati Chopra. What began as a discussion on physical landscapes gradually expanded into an exploration of displacement, memory, and the invisible maps writers carry within themselves.
Unterweger spoke about European landscapes layered with war, silence, and history, and how they continue to shape contemporary writing even when unnamed. Banerjee drew from India’s postcolonial experience to describe belonging as something continuously negotiated rather than inherited. Together, they resisted simple binaries of home and exile, suggesting that much of modern literature exists in a state of productive dislocation.
The second evening shifted the tone from dialogue to emotion with Poetry Hour: Unquiet Words, featuring poets Badri Narayan, Parwati Tirkey, Charmi Chheda, Yulia Musakovska, and Radha Chakravarty. Introduced by Anisha Lalvani, the session framed poetry as a form that absorbs unrest rather than merely describing it.
The readings moved across marginalised histories, ecological grief, war, and intimate loss. Ukrainian poet Yulia Musakovska’s restrained verses stood out for their quiet intensity, offering a reminder that in times of violence, poetry often speaks most powerfully through understatement rather than spectacle. Across languages and lived realities, the poets demonstrated poetry’s capacity to hold anger and tenderness, despair and defiance, within the same breath.
The programme concluded with Between Us: Poems Beyond Language, a conversation between Musakovska and Unterweger, moderated by Asad Lalljee. The session was attended by Michael Pal, Director of the Austrian Cultural Forum, and Volodymyr Prytula, Second Secretary at the Embassy of Ukraine.
This final discussion turned inward, focusing on translation as an ethical and emotional act rather than a purely technical one. The writers reflected on what it means to carry poetry across languages when its original context is shaped by violence, and on what survives translation and what must inevitably change. Both described poetry as an act of listening, between writer and reader, between languages, and between histories that may never fully align. Translation, they suggested, rests less on equivalence and more on trust.
Taken together, the three sessions formed a coherent arc, moving from geography to voice and finally to the fragile space between languages. The presence of Indian writers and moderators ensured that these conversations were not framed as distant European concerns but as part of a shared global condition where questions of belonging, memory, and rupture are increasingly universal.
In a cultural moment often driven by speed and spectacle, the Austrian–Ukrainian literary programme stood out for its quiet seriousness. It offered no easy answers, but it preserved complexity, resisted simplification, and kept open the possibility of dialogue. As the final evening drew to a close, what lingered was a shared recognition that across borders and languages, words remain one of the most enduring ways through which we find one another.
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