The fourth edition of the IHC Indian Languages Festival, Samanvay, is scheduled to take place during November 6–9, 2014. This year the festival’s theme is Bhashantar Deshantar: Translation Transnation. It focuses on Indian languages which have a transnational presence. The idea is to bring together authors and translators across languages and national borders to discuss how languages and selves travel and get translated into each other.
We have tried to keep a varied range of personalities that speak across age groups and cultures. The four days of the festival would witness 2 Padma Shri awardees, 11 Sahitya Akademi recipients and 3 National Film Award winners. There would be 20 languages and dialects in Samanvay 2014.
There would be conversations around literature, media and translations, along with poetry performances, folk art and cultural evenings. Book exhibitions for Samanvay attendees would be put up by various publishing houses. Samanvay has been conceived as an annual celebration of writing in Indian languages. The festival has aimed at generating dialogue across Indian languages at various levels and has emerged as the only literature festival dedicated exclusively to Indian languages.
The inaugural edition (2011) tried to explore the problematic of bringing various literatures under the master signifier, ‘Indian’, and to understand the mysterious bond that makes these various literatures at once distinct and collective. In 2012, the festival moved on to highlight and discover the heritage of Indian languages through the strain of ‘Boli, Baani, Bhasha: Gaon, Kasba, Shehar’. The 2013 edition, themed 'Jodti Zubanein, Judti Zubanein: The Langauge Connections', carried a special focus on language diversity and had sessions around languages and cultures which are vanishing, which are considered 'endangered' and are struggling to stay alive.
Since its inception, the India Habitat Centre has endeavoured to create platforms for public discourse across different genres of the pursuit of excellence by Indian minds. ‘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.