Tributes to Kushwant Singh, Ananthamurthy at 'Samanvay' fest

Tributes to stalwart writers like U R Ananthamurthy, Bipan Chandra, Rajendra Yadav, Nabarun Bhattacharya and Khushwant Singh is planned at the upcoming 'Samanvay - The Indian Language Festival, which begins here on November 6.
In its fourth edition, the four-day festival is set to feature over 90 speakers and performers in 20 languages and dialects across 21 sessions.
The festival hosted by the India Habitat Centre is themed on "Translations Transnations" with focus on Indian languages that have a transnational presence like Bangla, Bhojpuri, Chhattisgarhi, English, Hindi, Konkani, Malayalam, Punjabi and Sanskrit.
For the first time, since its debut, the event includes line up of host writers from other Asian countries like Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh etc.

The Samanvay Bhasha Samman 2014 is set to be conferred upon leading Hindi poet and writer Ashok Vajpeyi for his "lifetime contribution to Hindi and Indian literature", organisers said.
Sessions at the festival include -- The Information War; A Tryst with Modernity; Words without Borders; Imagining Pardes; Kiska Sheher, Kiski Zubaan; Displacement, Pathos, Songs; One Language, Two Countries.

Altaf Tyrewala, Anvar Ali, Arunava Sinha, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Asad Zaidi, Badri Narayan, CS Lakshmi, Darain Shahidi, Fakrul Alam, Gillian Wright, Harrish Iyer, Jerry Pinto, Koushiki Dasgupta, K Satchidanandan, Melvyn Rodrigues, Madan Gopal Singh, Mrityunjay, Namvar Singh, Rudranarayan Panigrahi, Ram Gopal Bajaj, Saurabh Shukla, Swanand Kirkire, Syed Samsul Haq, Surabhi Sharma and Vinay Pathak are among those set to attend the event.

Announcing the Festival, Rakesh Kacker, Festival Director, Samanvay said, "We are happy that in last three years, we have been able to make Samanvay a platform of diverse and unique voices from Indian languages and dialects.
"As earlier, we hope to bring voices of dissent and agreement, hope and despair, anger and calm together to forge dialogues and partnerships that question and celebrate our ideas of each other and find ways of sustaining the unique diversity that constitutes our culture.