Hikayat 2024

Hikayat… stories and lore that have been passed down from generation to generation over aeons. Each story is a vestige of unimaginable pasts packaged and presented in a palatable manner for the present. The literature festival at Pramiti is called Hikayat because it seeks to reinvent and reimagine contexts of relevance for the craft, consumption and artistic pursuit of literature. 

Our first edition in the year 2023 was an escapade into understanding how literature helped us make sense of diversity and inclusive identity. For our second edition, we will be investigating the role of literature not just as an interpretive tool but also as an imaginative tool that allows us to create alternate realities to experiment with our judgments and choices.

The theme

Humans, perhaps by virtue of their dichotomous rationality and emotionality, have always been concerned with the existential question of what determines positivity and negativity. What is good? What is bad? What is right? What is wrong? What is beautiful? What is ugly? These are all questions that have crossed our minds at some point in time. In the face of the growth, evolution and metamorphosis of the world these are also the questions that plague us, mercilessly begging for our answers.

Philosophy, in theory, has provided some compelling answers to these questions and continued contemplation in this direction seeks to provide more answers. However, the world of literature, as a creative and expressive art, offers a very interesting stage for these questions. Literature offers a continuum of imaginative potentialities that help us workshop, at very low stakes, the consequences of various choices in situations of ethical dilemma. 

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, is a practical and theoretical contemplation on the place of literature in unravelling our moral and ethical conditioning as a social group and, in extension, as a continually transfiguring species.