Past Programmes

Painted Words: Literature, Language, Silence

The Lecture will describe the history of aphasia imposed on Indian languages. It will present a comprehensive picture of about 800 languages in existence in India, and discuss how they are rapidly losing imaginative expression. The lecture will present the speaker's engagement with these languages and his understanding of the silence with which they have to survive. The lecture will attempt to provide a perspective on the uneasy journey of Imagination in Indian literary practice over the last two centuries and to show the inter-dependece of cultural diversity and creative arts in our time.

G. N. Devy

Ganesh Devy, a literary scholar and cultural activist, writes in three languages – Marathi, Gujarati and English. Till 1996 he taught English literature at the M. S. University of Baroda. He left his academic position to take up conservation of threatened languages in India.
Among the several institutions he founded since then are the Bhasha Research & Publication Centre, Budhan Theatre and the Adivasi Academy.
He has put to script for the first time for 11 languages existing in oral traditions, promoted and published literature in 26 languages, helped educating in non-formal schools over 20,000 children from indigenous communities and has established economic empowerment activities in 2200 villages in tribal districts of Guajrat. Devy has campaigned for protection of the rights of nomadic and other discriminated tribes and has been Advisor to the Government of India on these issues.
Devy’s major publications in English include In Another Tongue (1993), Tradition and Modernity (1997), Painted Words(2002), Indian Literary Criticism: Theory and Interpretation (2002), A Nomad Called Thief: Reflections on Adivasi Voice and Silence (2006) and Indigeneity: Expression and Representation (2008). The G. N. Devy Reader (Orient Blackswan) containing four of his book length essays was published in 2009.

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