According to the organisers, unlike its previous editions, the festival this year will be an extended affair over the next few months, where separate sessions will be organized at India Habitat Centre and elsewhere here, before culminating into the main event scheduled to be held from November 5 - 7 this year.
Delhi being the host city, it was only fair that the first of the sessions in the 'No Tongues Barred Conversations' series, was dedicated to the languages of Delhi as a panel of true "Dilliwallahs" traced the evolution and then collapse of the erstwhile Hindustani into the present day Hindi and Urdu.
A revisit at Delhi's history will reveal how at different points of time, varied communities speaking different tongues coexisted within the walled city, giving rise to a language that became common to all.
Also Read
Picking up from where several sceptics have previously dismissed the very existence of Hindustani in the first place, former professor of English literature at the University of Delhi, Alok Rai said that in fact the "grammar books are not the right place to look at if you are looking for Hindustani."
"What Hindustani is to my mind is a communicative intention. It is a language that is born when one reaches out to someone who is different," he said pointing out that only a city can serve as such a space where people would migrate to for better opportunities. Delhi, in this regard has perennially been the centre of action - sometimes for trade and at other times for politics.
writer Syeda Hameed offered a glimpse of the various tongues in which the city conversed as its rulers changed from the Mughals to the British etc. Through the poetries that were penned at the time.
Hameed talked about how several male poets during the reign of Bahadur Shah Zafar wrote using a pseudonym of a woman. She recited a couplet by Mirza Ali Baig who wrote under the name of Nazneen. Baig is said to have performed the verse at a mushaira at Emperor Zafar's court posing as a woman with a dupatta over her head.
She read out interactions between individuals of different communities like kebab sellers, small businessmen, and washerwomen etc. - in their respective quintessesntial tongues, which were not only entertaining but also indicative of the process of evolution the language must have undergone to become the speech that we speak today.
Rizio also announced the first ILF Samanvay Project, "Langscaping Delhi: Mapping a city's linguistic routes" through which the team seeks to look at look at Delhi's space and its languages and study their dynamics.
"By a kind of survey we will map the linguistic space of Delhi. This is also our response to the growing intolerance in the city to show that the city is a multilingual space and that it is the ethos of this space.
We are hoping that we will do an audio-visual documentation of the languages of Delhi, involving students who will internalise and transform this into a people's movement," she said.