Maithili People Spread Their Language Wherever They Go!

Gulzar Ahmad Ganai and sathi

The 02^nd day of the IHC Indian Languages Festival – Samanvay focused on the various shades of rich Indian literary heritage. The sessions focused on Manipuri (The Idea of a Nation); Maithili (Love’s own language); Kannada (Tales of Modernities: Small Spaces, Big Idea), English (Where is my reader?) languages engaging authors of respective languages. Also the day witnessed a prose reading session- Mapping Cities: Shehar Dar Shehar by Kashinath Singh, Laxman Gaikwad and Om Thanvi and a session on Digital Publishing: Future of Indian Languages Publishing in Digital Era. The day ended with Kashmiri Sufiana Kalam performance by Gulzar Ahmed Ganie.

The day began with a session on Manipuri language discussion the theme – The Idea of a nation, where language authors – Yumlembam Ibomcha, Robin S Ngangom, Tayenjam Bijoykumar Singh and Dr Dhanbir Laisham shared their views. This followed the prose reading session – Mapping Cities- Shehar Dar Shehar by Kashinath Singh, Laxman Gaikwad and Om Thanvi. The Maithili language session focused on the theme – Love’s own language where Maithili authors highlighted the heritage of the languages which is filled with literature n love including Vidyapati, whose first writing was themed around love. Famous character- Gonu Jha’s creator Vibha Rani shared her experience of a festival inn Chennai where they just translate the all unpublished literature in to Maithili and thus the languages is spreading across the country. She also stressed that the Maithili people use their own language wherever they go. So it is not a dying language.

The Kannada session focused around theme- Tales of Modernities: Small Spaces, Big Idea where participating authors Gopalkrishna Pai, Banu Mushtaq, BT Jahnavi, and Mamta Sagar shared their views and experiences of richness of the Kannada language and how it has highlighted larger issues of society. The session on English – Where is my reader had intense discussion where one of the participating authors “Losing My Virginity” fame Madhuri Banarjee stressed on need of differentiating writing to promote literature. She said it will help attract reader to the select books. The Digital publishing session highlighted the need of adopting digital technology in current scenario to strengthen the literature and keep the languages’ heritageintact. The session was attended by Nikhil Chandra of Handygo Technology, Shiva Kumar of Google Books and Kinshu Sinha of FlipKart. Audience' question on existence of library culture halted the session for a moment before speakers assured that the digitalization will help taking books and literature beyond geographical boundaries and thus helping book reading culture.      

The day also saw poetry recitation session- Kavi ke Ilake me by Gujarati author Sitanshu Yashaschandra, Hindi author Arun Kamal, Rajasthani author- Arjun Deo Charan and Kannada author Mamta Sagar.

The day ended with performance of Kashmiri Sufiana Kalam performance by Gulzar Ahmad Ganie.