The second day of the ongoing Indian Languages festival boasted of an impressive line-up of writers cutting across languages and borders during multiple sessions.
The day commenced with 'Pulp Gulp: The New Hindi Popular', a session on the emergence of a new popular fiction in Hindi literature with Anu Singh Chaudhary, Prabhat Ranjan, Rajendra Dhodapkar and the creative director of the festival, Satyanand Nirupam.
The second session was in sync with the theme of the festival, "Translation Transnation" and saw some relevant comments over challenging decisions of translation -- what to translate, what form to use, for whom to translate from the panel comprising Gillian Wright, Arundhati Subramaniam, Fakrul Alam (Bangladesh) and K Satchidanand.
"We should look at Indian literature as a mosaic of different literatures, we should accept its plurality and difference between one language and other and also find out what is common between them. Though this was more important at the time of the national struggle," Malayalam poet and critic K Satchinand said.
The panelists remarked how there is not much thought given to the process of translations and how a translator actually goes about negotiating with a language in order to make it accessible to readers from other languages, something they believed is often ignored.
The other sessions included 'Bastar ki Badalti Boliyaan', a dialogue on the popular dialects like Halbi, Dorli, Bhatri amongst others spoken in parts of Chhattisgarh.
'Border Lines', a session on Tamil literature saw an interesting mix from literature, poetry, theatre with the presence of Ambai (C S Lakshmi), A Mangai (Padma Venkataraman), and lyricist Kutti Revathi.
As per the festival's theme, the session sought to discuss on the same stage Tamil literature across borders in India and Sri Lanka.
The politics of individuals shifting their borders and geographies and in the bargain also changing they way they speak the languages was discussed in a session titled "Kiska Shahar, Kiski Zuban" amongst a panel comprising of Altaf Tyrewala, lyricist Irshad Kamil, Rakesh Kumar Singh, and actor Saurabh Shukla along with Jerry Pinto.
The evening was high on flavours of Naga Folk music, with performances by Testeo sisters, Alobo Naga, Mangyang Kichu and Sepongla Sangtam.
