Excuse me, your border is perforated

BY ROANNA GONSALVES

One passionate scholar. 12 Indian writers. 24 Australian writers. Innumerable stories. This was the Australia India Literatures International Forum (AILIF), held at our magnificent house of books, the State Library of New South Wales from September 4 to 6, 2012. The legendary writer and actor Girish Karnad led a stellar contingent of writers from India who shared the space with many Australian writers including award winning Indigenous writers Alexis Wright and Ali Cobby Eckermann.

A love affair and the birth of AILIF

Before we continue with the story of AILIF, we must first tell the story of how AILIF was born. It is in part, the story of a Delhi girl, Dr Mridula Nath Chakraborty from the Writing and Society Research Centre (WSRC) at the University of Western Sydney (UWS), the passion and brains behind AILIF. The story bears telling because it reaffirms the value of multilingualism and the value of a ground-breaking event such as AILIF. It began when Dr Chakraborty or Mridula as she is familiarly called, became fascinated by the work of the celebrated Hindi writer, Munshi Premchand when studying in an English medium school in Delhi. Upon the insistence of her mother, she then learnt to read and write in her mother tongue, Bengali. The story continued when Mridula began working with Katha, the acclaimed publishing house that specializes in translations, and she fell deeply in love with Indian literature in translation, finding a “renewed sense of the fantastically expressive intricacies and idioms of the vernacular tongues, the regional languages of India”. However, it is upon her arrival in Australia that the plot thickens. Mridula’s eloquent words tell us of a journey of revelation, one that many of us have undertaken as Indian immigrants to Australia, finding that Australia is truly