The 6th edition of the Indian Languages Festival - Samanvay opened here recently with an ode to Delhi as the audience was transported centuries back, with lesser known narratives complemented by illustrious readings and recitations, to witness the genesis of the multilinguistic culture of the city as we see it today.
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.
"We don't want it to be a single odd event but a larger discourse that we are trying to create," Rizio Yohannan Raj, Creative Director, ILF Samanvay said.
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.
Hindustani too, was a product of one such co-existence that happened approximately around the 13th century, primarily of Hindi (Khariboli dialect) speaking and Urdu speaking communities with a large amount of vocabulary borrowed from other languages like Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic and Chagatai.
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.
"This experience of inescapable heterogeneity is necessarily an urban process. By definition, a city is where you encounter people who are not like yourself and therefore it is in negotiating and living with difference, that the thing that we call Hindustani is created," Rai said.
Former member of the Planning Commission and feminist
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.
Also, adding to the authenticity of the fervor from the city's linguistically rich past were readings by Fouzia, the first female dastango who enacted plausible scenes leafed out from the lives of people who once resided in the Delhi has that has long ceased to exist.
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.
As part of this project, the team at ILF is looking to make an audio-visual documentation out of the idea and make it a "people's movement for languages," while also inviting stakeholders into the project.
"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.
