Someone has rightly said that literary festivals not only foster communication, but also provide opportunities for culture, language, literature, traditions, and freedom of expression. The atmosphere becomes fragrant with the music, art, dialogue and laughter of these fairs.
If it is said, it will not be wrong that there has been a wave of love for books, writers, poets and artists in the new generation, literary fairs have played a major role in it. At the same time, literary fairs are also becoming a part of our tradition. By the way, the tradition of organizing literary fairs is very old now. The circles noticed this and started efforts to organize a literary festival and as a result of their efforts, two years later in 2010, a similar literary festival was organized in Karachi.
It started from Karachi, but Lahore has rendered valuable services in literature, so soon the direction of the literary fair was turned towards Lahore and a literary fair was organized in the city of Zinda Dalan Lahore under the name of Lahore Literary Festival.
The month of February in Punjab, especially in Lahore, is famous for Bihar and Basant festival. People from all over the world used to come to Lahore to celebrate Basant. Instead, it turned into bloody Basant, so the government banned it. As a result, the ancient cultural festival that created entertainment and happiness was cut off from our lives forever. Literary festival cannot be called as a substitute for a festival like Basant, but it can be considered as a source of enrichment in consciousness and entertainment. Regarding Literary Festival it can be said that it is a modified and developed form of events organized under the name of Literature Festival.
If the literature festival events used to be limited only to the expression of ideas about works in different languages, now during the literary festivals, along with discussions on language and literature, dance and music gatherings are also organized. The organization of dance and music gatherings along with literary gatherings cannot be ignored in any way, because despite looking separate, these arts have been interrelated in the subcontinent since ancient times in such a way that their development is under the influence of each other. It is done.
In ancient times, when ‘Shakuntala’, a story written by Kalidas, derived from the Mahabharata, was presented to the people in a dramatic form, the presentation was a combination of literature, music and dance, similar to Western opera. During this performance, a singer used to sing the dialogues of various actors based on poems in a loud voice, in the form of a song. I used to dance while moving in such a way that the story told by the singer would be easily conveyed in the minds of those whose ears could not reach his voice.
Like in the recent past, this time Lahore Literary Festival also ended with 3 days of literary colors. On the last day of the literary festival, local and foreign intellectuals, writers, artists and poets enlightened the knowledge in 24 sessions. Like the first two days, on the last day too, a total of 24 sessions were held in the four main halls of Al-Hamra, in which eminent writers, artists, poets, professors and well-known bureaucrats discussed various topics including literature and culture. Writers Rafafat Hayat and Osama Siddiqui were present in the Urdu fiction session of the festival while Tanveer Anjum, Fatimah Mehro and Afzal Ahmed Syed participated in the Nai Nasl, Nai Poetry session.
