By Nava Thakuria*
Guwahati Gears Up for Third Pragjyotishpur Litfest
Festival to Celebrate Assam’s Literary Heritage
Guwahati: The ancient city of Pragjyotishpur, today’s Guwahati, is set to relive its timeless literary and cultural splendour as the third Pragjyotishpur Literature Festival opens its gates this November. The three-day celebration of words, art, and heritage, organised by the Sankardev Education and Research Foundation (SERF) under the evocative theme “In Search of Roots,” will run from 14 to 16 November 2025 and promises to be a confluence of creative minds from across India.
In an era when literature festivals are reshaping India’s cultural calendar, the festival aims to go beyond glamour to rediscover the deep, living legacy of the land once known as Pragjyotishpur—the luminous seat of ancient learning, faith, and art in the far eastern corner of the subcontinent. This year’s edition brings together authors, translators, art connoisseurs, critics, performing artistes, and young writers in what organisers describe as an immersive literary experience rooted in Assam’s civilizational ethos.
Spread across three intellectually vibrant days, the literature festival (Litfest) will host a range of panel discussions, interactive sessions, multilingual poetry recitations, and a special workshop on contemporary nature writing. According to organisers, these engagements will offer both introspection and creative joy—“an intellectual treat” where traditions meet new literary impulses.
Among the highlights are five carefully curated sessions: “Evolution of Assamese Performing Arts: From Ankiya Bhawana to Bhramyman,” “Evolution of Assamese Lyric Literature: Tracing the Journey from the 1990s to the Contemporary Era,” “Assamese Language, Literature and Journalism: Growth and Expansion,” “Transcending Language Boundaries: The Triumphant Journey of Assamese Translated Literature,” and “The Creative World of Novelist Birendra Kumar Bhattacharya: An Exploratory Journey.” Each of these, festival organisers say, has been designed to ignite dialogue between the classical and the contemporary.
Adding depth to the programme, the Litfest will feature a special session dedicated to Kalaguru Bishnu Prasad Rabha, the multifaceted genius who left an indelible mark on Assamese music, painting, literature, and political thought. A nature-inspired writing workshop, open-air multilingual poetry gatherings featuring voices in Asomiya, Sanskrit, Hindi, English, Bodo, Karbi, Mishing, Nepali, Bengali, Rabha, Tiwa, and other regional tongues, will further enrich the festival’s inclusivity.
The Pragjyotishpur Literature Festival now stands proudly among the country’s expanding constellation of literary carnivals—alongside Jaipur, Kolkata, Kalinga, Hyderabad, Kerala, Mumbai, Lucknow, Goa, Dehradun, Patna, Kashmir, Bundelkhand, and Shillong. These events, collectively, have transformed India’s reading culture, offering a common stage where writers, thinkers, playwrights, journalists, musicians, and cinephiles exchange ideas and imagination.
The Litfest president, Phanindra Kumar Dev Choudhury, underlined that the festival’s core objective is to showcase the region’s history, culture, and languages in their rightful context. Once the heart of the ancient Kamrup kingdom, Pragjyotishpur’s civilizational legacy, he noted, remains central to India’s broader narrative of knowledge and art. Dev Choudhury expressed concern that many among the educated elite continue to interpret Indian literature through foreign frameworks, often overlooking the profundity of indigenous traditions. “Our task,” he remarked, “is to reconnect the new generation with the serenity and depth of our own literary roots.”
Prior to PLF, Guwahati had hosted three editions of the Brahmaputra Literary Festival, jointly organised by the National Book Trust (NBT) and the Publication Board, Assam, at the Srimanta Sankaradeva Kalakshetra. Building on that legacy, PLF has emerged as an independent platform that blends scholarship with celebration, regional spirit with national resonance.
This year’s edition, Dev Choudhury hopes, will continue that journey by redefining the heritage of Kamrup–Kamakhya civilisation, reviving the splendour of a land that once inspired poets, scholars, and saints from across the Indian subcontinent. As the city prepares to host its third literary carnival, Guwahati appears poised not merely to celebrate books and ideas—but to reclaim the luminous narrative of Pragjyotishpur, the city of light.
*Senior journalist
