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. The fourth edition in 2014 furthered the literary discourse with the theme Bhashantar Deshantar: Translation Transnation and aimed to foreground the ability of languages and dialects to travel across time and space, which belittles geographical borders.
The fifth edition of the IHC Indian Languages Festival, Samanvay, is scheduled to take place during November 26–29, 2015. This year the festival’s theme is Insider/Outsider: Writing India’s dreams and Realities. Like every year, we aim to invite a varied range of personalities that speak across age groups and cultures.The festival will hold 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.
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.