Understanding pulse of our times

The fifth edition of India Habitat Centre’s Indian Languages Festival “ILF Samanvay 2015” got off to a phenomenal start. This year’s theme of ILF Samanvay is ‘Insider/Outsider, Writing India’s Dreams and Realities’. This year, the festival broadened its mandate by developing in a range of verticals such as a curated art space, daily workshops by eminent experts in a range of topics from translation to food appreciation, book releases, social outreach in schools with the festival resource persons, and curated food stalls focusing on the food traditions of Kashmir, Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra.

In addition to the features mentioned above, the festival is bringing together authors, writers, translators and publishers onto the same platform, to discuss and debate various facets of how a creative person remain at once an ‘Insider and an Outsider’ to understand the pulse of our times and work towards social change.

Before delivering his keynote address, well-known Marxist literary theorist and political commentator, Aijaz Ahmad officially inaugurated fifth edition of “ILF Samanvay” 

In his address, Aijaz Ahmad shared his views on the languages in general and Indian Languages in particular and how it has shaped the citizenry of India. “In India, political unity does not automatically give us, or requires of us, a literary or linguistic unity. Hence, the study of Indian literature should be historically grounded and organised primarily in terms of particular linguistic traditions and regional clusters, and discussed on the model of what I would call ‘regional Indian cosmopolitanism’. The points of intersection of different linguistic-literary traditions, along with causes and consequences of those overlaps, should be established through careful investigation. The hierarchical relations of power that exist among languages and traditions must be examined, and a system of education that profoundly addresses the question of multilinguality, developed. Such a system must also give room to understand the widespread connection between the linguistic-literary and the performative.”

This component articulates and interprets language as a flow beyond the literary in our unsettling times. The art works of Riyas Komu, co-founder of the Cochin-Muziris Biennale, artist-weaver Priya Ravish Mehra, and performance photography exhibition curated by Kanika Anand are among the highlights. Besides, curated running slide shows of painter V.Ramesh, cartoonist EP Unny, Christel Davedawson and dance film streaming by Gati Dance forum etc. 

Post the keynote address, Tribute and Conversation: Common People, Uncommon Minds, a profound tribute was underway in the memory of the great Indian political cartoonist RK Laxman by leading cartoonist EP Unny, Krishna Prasad, Christel Devadawson with the moderator Hartosh Singh Bal keeping the tribute profound, as RK Laxman would have loved it to be. 

The eminent panel also discussed the state of cartoon art in India and EP Unny opined that the cartoon is developing into unchartered terrain where the ‘image, text and voice meet and debate’.

 The evening was brought alive by a sublime Tibetan music performance by Loten Namling, Sonam Dolma and Jamyang Tashi, Tibetan artists in exile living in India. 

The Creative Director of ILF Samanvay Ms. Rizio Yohannan Raj also expressed her joy on the occasion. “As its name suggests, ILF Samanvay privileges the vital principles of co-ordination that allows us to live, work and remember together—co-existence, co-operation, commemoration.  This would mean that ILF Samanvay is not merely an annual carnival of the literati in India, but a ceaseless enterprise to institutionalize the values fundamental to the co-existence of languages, and hence the diverse cultures they live in, represent and reflect on, too.