Authors, scholars, performers, and public thinkers come together to read, converse, and stage work that keeps the conscience of the republic awake.
Chief Guest · Journalist & Media Academician
Founder of the Asian College of Journalism, Shri. Sashi Kumar has shaped media education and newsroom culture in India for decades. His work continuously asks how journalism can defend constitutional values, public reason, and democratic accountability in times of noise and polarization.
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Chief Guest
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Bureau Chief @ NDTV | News Anchor | Journalist | TEDX
Topic: Literature as Public Conscience: New Voices, New India
An award winning senior television journalist and news anchor is a household name in India and the diaspora, for credible, unbiased and ethical television news reporting. Interviewer/Moderator.
Panelists
Author · Academic
Dr. Ruth Vanita is a scholar and author whose writing explores gender, literary history, and social imagination across languages. Her essays and books open difficult conversations with clarity, making scholarship accessible to wider publics without sacrificing rigor.
Authors
Author · Screenwriter
Known for genre-bending fiction rooted in Indian myth and folk memory, Mr. K. Hari Kumar writes narratives that examine fear, belonging, and historical residue. His craft session focuses on building atmosphere, character stakes, and ethical tension in contemporary storytelling.
Author · Scholar of Indian Knowledge Systems
Ms. Ami Ganatra writes and speaks on epics, ethics, and civilizational memory, connecting textual traditions to present-day institutions and leadership. Her sessions invite readers to engage critically with inherited narratives and read them in context, not as slogans.
Author · Poet
Ms. Sharanya Manivannan is an acclaimed poet and prose writer celebrated for lyrical language, feminist imagination, and re-readings of mythology. Her readings at the festival foreground tenderness, memory, and resistance as literary forms that speak to contemporary anxieties.
Performer · Storyteller
Mr. Vikram Sridhar animates folklore through voice, gesture, and audience interaction, reviving oral traditions for younger listeners. His performance lecture demonstrates how storytelling can be playful, pedagogic, and politically alert at the same time.
Performers
Performer · Bharatanatyam Choreographer
Mr. Parshwanath Upadhye and ensemble present choreography that weaves classical rigor with contemporary staging. Their production at SAHITYA 2026 foregrounds body, rhythm, and myth as living archives that continue to negotiate identity and social imagination.
Performer · Stage Collective
Theatre Marina is a Chennai-based collective known for dramatic adaptations of canonical material. Their stage work at the festival rethinks epic conflict for current audiences, balancing visual intensity with language, silence, and ensemble discipline.
Panelist · Film Director
Mr. Sarjun K. M. is a filmmaker whose narrative style moves between psychological realism and symbolic imagery. On the panel, he discusses adaptation, writing for screen, and the ethics of representing violence, intimacy, and memory in visual culture.
Panelist · Poet & Public Intellectual
Dr. Kutti Revathi is a celebrated Tamil poet, lyricist, and public intellectual whose writing confronts patriarchy, caste, and silence with formal daring. Her panel brings poetry into dialogue with cinema, activism, and everyday language politics.
Panelist · Poet
Ms. Srijani Mitra brings a younger poetic voice to the festival, with work that meditates on intimacy, city life, and emotional weather. This featured reading extends the main panels with a standalone session dedicated to new writing and emergent literary practice.