International Calligraphy Festival of Kerala 2024
The third International Calligraphy Festival of Kerala (ICFK) took place in October 2024, and I was invited to run a session. I had the fortune to see many exemplary calligraphers all over the world come together and demonstrate their work over three days of the festival.
Renowned Malayalam calligrapher Narayana Bhattathiri organizes the conference every year, and it was amazing to witness that many of the speakers and calligraphers were sharing the responsibilities and taking active role in the organization and execution of the sessions. The audience and speaker participation and interactions were warmly welcoming. The demographics was very distributed — students, professionals, calligraphers; and of all ages and genders.
An epiphany
During the session by Prof. G.V. Sreekumar when he asked the participants to write the word ‘സൂര്യൻ’ (the Sun); I took a survey of the writings. What I found was that the older generation all wrote the word in traditional Malayalam orthography; and a large number of younger generation also wrote it in traditional orthography. The latter group were not taught in schools to read or write in traditional script (the text books are all in broken/reformed script). Intrigued how they were familiarized with the traditional orthography, I had questioned how they knew to write in this fashion. The answers were categorized into:
- They saw their parents write in traditional orthography.
- They saw their grandparents write in traditional orthography (but their parents write in reformed script).
- Most strikingly, some youngsters were sure this was the ‘correct’ way of writing and yet they could not explain how or from where they learnt it.
The response from the third category is very interesting: because they learnt the script ‘organically’ and it is imbibed in their identity — which is what the definition of ‘culture’ is. The revelation is that; the script belongs to its people and no matter what the government decrees about (ref: Kerala govt orders about script reform in 1971 and 2022).
The session
Together with type designer Athul Jayaraman, I had a joint session on typography. Athul focused more on the type design and I had elaborated more on Malayalam script (traditional orthography), and font engineering & techniques.
The Mathrubhumi news team also interviewed both of us and published a two-part series of the interview on their new site:
The experience
Of the many conferences I have been to, ICFK 2024 was one the best un-conferences in my experience. I met a lot of exemplary, yet humble & approachable, calligraphers (some of them gave me their autographed booklets, thank you!), learnt a lot and enjoyed thoroughly.
