Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
Bay Area residents enjoyed a literary weekend at the popular annual festival SALA 2025, produced by Art Forum SF on September 13 and 14. Sobhan Hassanvand of India Currents, a media sponsor, was out and about filming people taking in the speakers, festivities, and food.
This year’s theme was Thoughts Without Borders, and featured contemporary South Asian speakers and over 24 panel discussions on literature, art, epicurean, and diaspora social issues.
At her panel, Blatant Defiance, Alka Joshi, discussed her inspiration and research process for Six Days in Bombay, her fourth historical fiction novel, with writer Shikha Malaviya. Was Amrita Sher-Gil’s life cut short because she was determined to paint what she wanted, or the irreverent life she led in India and Europe of the 1930s?
Alka Joshi signed copies of her latest book, Six Days in Bombay, for fans. She said, “Young people have so much potential to make this world a better place, to make this world a more accepting place, and I think that one of the ways they can do that is by writing about their history as well as the future that they hope for in this world.”
Dr. Anjali Arondekar moderated a conversation with renowned mythologist and author Devdutt Pattanaik, who reinterprets ancient Indian stories for contemporary life, blending mythology with insights on culture, leadership, and identity. Dr. Arondekar is a leading scholar in Feminist Studies, researching sexuality, caste, and historiography within South Asian and Indian Ocean contexts.
Acclaimed poet and artist Imtiaz Dharker reflected on a life in language, art, and displacement in a wide-ranging conversation with poet Arundhathi Subramaniam. Dharker commented, “What SALA is doing is they’re bringing in all kinds of people to listen and to share art, literature, poetry. They are the language of being human, how we live in this world. They give us roots into how we’re going to live.”