Mystic Kalinga Festival to focus on Bhakti poetry

Themed 'From the carnal to the cosmic: A celebration of Bhakti poetry', the Mystic Kalinga Festival, in its third edition, will celebrate the formless divine invoked by Bhakti movement exponents like Kabir, Tulsidas, Jayadeva, Tukaram, and Meerabai.

Organised by Odisha Diary Foundation, the literary-cultural festival that will bring together music, dance and discussion, is scheduled to be held in Bhubaneswar and Chilika in Odisha from January 5.

Arundhathi Subramaniam, the creative director of the event said that the aim this year was not to "merely discuss Bhakti, but to distil its very essence".

"It is a celebration of Bhakti that great tearing disruptive experience of human longing. A longing so all-encompassing that it has often blurred the divide between the sacred and the sensual, the erotic and the existential, the human and the divine," she said in a statement.

The festival will be a mlange of poetry readings, lectures, music concerts, panel discussions and dance performances by eminent artistes, seekers and scholars, she added.

Over the course of three days of the festival, the city will witness participation by renowned poets and artistes including eminent Odiya writers Sitakant Mahapatra, and Ramakanta Rath, and mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik, writers Ashok Vajpeyi, and Jerry Pinto among others.

The festival will feature famous folk singer Parvathy Baul, who will share her personal understanding of Bhakti and what it means to walk the mystical path as a contemporary female seeker and musician.

Filmmaker-singer Shabnam Virmani will discuss how the mystic poets swept into her life and led her into a voyage she never anticipated.

Devdutt Pattanaik will reflect on why regional Bhakti movements are often ignored and eclipsed, while noted scholar and translator Arshia Sattar will discuss the Valmiki Ramayana as a biography of Rama before he became 'god'.

Rashmi Ranjan Parida, founder and director of the festival, said the event was born out of a need to connect to people's hearts through poetry, music and dance, and explained why it was important to focus on mythology, and spiritual literature.

"Literature has the potential to connect a divided society and it can transform self-centeredness to world-centeredness. Kalinga Literature Festival was first launched in 2014 to celebrate this potential of literature," Parida said.

The festival will come to a close on January 7.