IIITH celebrated International Mother Language Day on 21 and 22 February. The event was inaugurated on 21 February by Prof P J Narayanan, who unveiled a multi-lingual video made by students as part of IIITH’s Silver Jubilee celebrations. This was followed by a talk on A Historic Defence of Mother Tongue and Challenge to Linguistic-Epistemic Hegemony by Dr Vikas Gupta, Member, Academic Council, Delhi University.
A Summary of Dr. Vikas Gupta’s talk:
Scholarship on linguistic-epistemic orders in South Asia has powerfully captured the historical trends of hegemony, standardisation, separation and conflict and it alludes to their finality, eternality and universality attained by early 20th century. The talk examines constructive work of an exemplary champion of mother tongues, namely Munshi or Molvi Zaka Ullah (1832-1910). Knowing the limitations imposed by colonialism and the hegemony of English, he posed a constructive challenge from within its heart by successfully showing how mother-tongue can be used for knowledge production and dissemination in every branch of learning from Elementary to Higher levels. He produced in Urdu about 200 books (more than half on science and mathematics) and innumerable essays on diverse subjects.
The question of language is essentially linked with the issues of knowledge, power and existence. Zaka Ullah advocated an approach of multilingualism and pluralism recognising the constantly fluid and evolving nature of languages; admiration for their respective knowledge treasures; caution against personification of language; recognition of the futility to search for the origins of particular languages; and alarm against the obsession for searching pristinely in language. It was anchored in the basic contours of universalistic objectives of education to create a more humane, just, tolerant and forward looking and yet firmly rooted society.
The first day’s program also consisted of a panel discussion on Preserving Endangered and Low-resource Languages in India with Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan, Loksatta Organisation; Dr. Kalika Bali, Microsoft Research and Dr. Reddy Syamala, Telugu University). The panel discussion was moderated by Dr. Radhika Mamidi.
The program concluded with a fun language activity
22 February’s program included Indian Language Technologies
- Enhancement of Telugu Wikipedia by Mr. P Krupal Kasyap
- Speech to Speech Machine Translation demos by Mr. Vandan Mujadia
- Speech processing tools by Mr. Sai Ganesh
This was followed by Vaangmayam: Confluence of Music and Language – coordinated by Dr. T K Saroja and Paraayii, a Telugu play based on Manto’s stories enacted by local theatre group B Studio.