A Festschrift for Delhi's prime chronicler
Narayani Gupta gathered where else but at the India International Centre for the release of a Festschrift on her. It is a measure of the calibre of the audience that most of them knew the meaning of that Germanic word so beloved of academics and applauded appreciatively as the book was unveiled.
For the uninitiated, a Festschrift, literally 'celebration writing', is a collection of essays published in honour of a scholar and presented to them at a landmark event such as retirement or birthday. As the contributors are usually that scholar's peers and friends, such volumes are also called liber amicorum or 'book of friends'. It inevitably has a virtual avatar nowadays too called Webfestschrift, and if published after a scholar's death the compilation is called a Gedenkschrift.
The Germanic overtone notwithstanding, Festschrifts are fairly commonplace in academic circles around the world, although initially there were more of these for luminaries in the field of sciences rather than humanities. Now such epistolary toasts are routinely brought out on poets and legal eagles (in India, Keki Daruwala and Nani Palkhivala come to mind), administrators and conservationists, economists and librarians, diplomats and theologians, even journalists.
Bringing out a celebratory volume rather than a commemorative one certainly has its plus points. In India, posthumous eulogies and symposiums to deliberate on the impact of someone's body of work after they have passed on are more the norm. Assessing a person's contribution while
