Noted author and columnist Githa Hariharan will deliver the 12th Anita Baruah Sarmah Memorial Lecture at Gauhati University on Saturday, 28th October, 2017. Organized by the Department of English, Gauhati University in collaboration with the North East Regional Institute of Management and the Anita Baruah Sarmah Memorial College of Education, the topic of the annual lecture this year will be “Narrating the Nation, Living the Nation”. The programme will start at 11 am in the Phanidhar Dutta Seminar Hall, Gauhati University.
This prestigious lecture has been organized continuously since 2006 after the untimely demise of Anita Baruah Sarmah who was a teacher in the Department of English, Gauhati University. In keeping with Anita Baruah Sarmah’s area of research, the lecture has been held on themes relating to nationalism. Speakers who have delivered this lecture so far include Professors K N Phukan, Harish Trivedi, Supriya Chaudhuri, P C Kar, Udaya Kumar, Krishna Sen, David R Syiemlieh, Sanjukta Dasgupta, Maitrayee Chaudhuri, Virginius Xaxa, and K Narayana Chandran.
The speaker this year, Githa Hariharan is an accomplished author who has published many acclaimed novels, short stories, essays, and articles. Her first novel Thousand Faces of Nigh won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the best book in 1993. Ghosts of Vasu Master, When Dreams Travel, In Times of Siege and Fugitive Histories are some her other widely acclaimed novels. She published a collection of very interesting short stories, The Art of Dying in 1993 and in 2004 she published The Winning Team, a collection of stories for children. She has written numerous essays, and two important collections are From India to Palestine: Essays in Solidarity and Almost Home: Cities and Other Places. She has edited A Southern Harvest, a collection of stories in English translation from four South Indian languages. Her fiction has been translated into many languages including French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Greek, Urdu and Vietnamese. Some of her writings have been included in anthologies like Salman Rushdie’s Mirrorwork: 50 Years of Indian Writing 1947-1997. Githa Hariharan had been a Visiting Professor and Writer-in-Residence in different universities including Jamilia Milia Islamia, Goa University, Dartmouth College and George Washington University, the University of Canterbury at Kent, and Nanyang Techological University. She is one of the founders of the Indian Writer’s Forum, an important platform for cultural politics.