Five National film award winners and one Oscar awardee are among the speakers at the third edition of the India Habitat Centre (IHC) Indian Languages’ Festival ‘Samanvay’ being held from 24 to 27 October.
This year the festival’s theme is ‘Jodti Zubanein, Judti Zubanein: Language Connections’. Spread over four days, the festival would also have seven Padma Shri awardees, twelve Sahitya Akademi recipients, and a Padma Bhushan awardee. Twenty languages and dialects would be featured at Samanvay 2013.
‘Samanvay’ is a platform for bringing together expressions of human thought in the varied and diverse cultural contexts that have been nurtured and have flourished in many languages spoken in our cultural milieu. These conversations amongst brilliant and well-known writers will seek to bring to our audiences the sparkle of multilingual expressions and their inspirations.
Participants from the world of entertainment include Gulzar, Jerry Pinto, Ketan Mehta, Mahesh Bhatt, Piyush Mishra, and Sanjay Kak.
Samanvay 2013 is about connections between languages and the connections languages make: Jodti Zubanein, Judti Zubanein. This is a continuum of the themes that defined the first two editions of the festival; the inaugural an exercise in understanding the notion of the Indian-ness of the various literatures of the country, the second a celebration of the multi-faceted interaction between languages and dialects. It is not only about listeners, readers and authors; it is also about the ethics and ethos of connecting through a language.
There will be conversations around oral literature, media, and translations, along with poetry performances, folk art, stand-up comedy, theatre and cultural evenings. Beyond the language specific sessions, we cover some of the issues that have shaped our intellectual and social life in recent times: sessions on civil society, activism, dalit and women writing, alternate voices from literature, cinema, radio, publishing, gender violence, aspirations, dreams and voices of the marginalized, and above all the threats of a new form of patriotism that treats itself as a religion.
Announcing the festival, Samanvay Festival Director Raj Liberhan said, “For us at the India Habitat Centre, Samanvay is not an event but a cause. All of us in this country find ways of translating our thoughts into words. Samanvay is a multilingual platform to debate, share and ideate on issues affecting us.”
