Professor GN Devy feels that alternate media should be used to make literature reach to a wider audience
Parul Bajaj, Indian Express, Tue Jul 19 2011
Almost everyone in India knows the Mahabharata, but no one has read it. Listening is also a literary experience and oral and written traditions cannot be separated. With literature comes memory and so many meaningful traditions,” says professor GN Devy, as he set out to talk on “Contemporary Creative Expression in India”, in a lecture organised by the Chandigarh Sahitya Akademi on July 16. He took the audience through amazing facets of Indian languages — a passionate subject for the author of books on tribals and literary criticism. The former professor of English at MS University, Baroda, has been working with tribals and campaigning for preservation and revitalisation of threatened languages and human rights activism for Adivasis and nomadic communities in India.
“I’m concerned about the rapidly disappearing dialects of India. Less than half a century ago, it was recorded that there were more than 1,600 languages spoken, but within a span of ten years the number has dropped to 109. This happened not because people stopped speaking the languages, but because politically it was not feasible to count them all as separate language dialects,” observes Devy. Read more >>
Source: Mother and Other Tongues – Indian Express
Address : http://www.indianexpress.com/news/mother-and-other-tongues/819426/
Date Visited: Wed May 29 2013 11:12:01 GMT+0200 (CEST)
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