Adi Dravidar and Tribal Welfare Department - Government of Tamil Nadu
in collaboration with
Centre for Social Justice and Equity - Madras School of Social Work
organises
National Conference – Tholkudi:
Preservation and Promotion of Tribal Cultural Heritage
The scope of the conference revolves around ensuring an informed policy making that entails initiatives covering the following overarching thematic:
- Endangered Tribal Languages and Oral Traditions
- Teaching and Learning Resources for Endangered Tribal Languages
- Revitalization of Endangered Tribal Languages: New Technologies & New Media
- Documenting and Archiving Endangered Tribal Languages
- Schemes for Preservation and Promotion of Tribal Languages
- Speech Community and Language Safeguarding Practices: The Scheduled Tribes of TamilNadu
| Delegates | |
|---|---|
| Dr. Sadhana Naithani is Professor at the Centre of German Studies, and Coordinator of Folklore Unit, JNU, New Delhi. She has been the president of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research (2016-2024) and is a Fellow of the American Folklore Society. She has been awarded Fellowships by the DAAD, the British Council and Fulbright Foundation. She has been a Visiting Professor in Department of Anthropology and Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley in 2007 and 2022-23. She has also been a consultant on several films on folklore, and has made ethnographic films on German villages. |  |
| Dr. C. Maheswaran is the former Director of Tribal Research Centre and the former Curator of Department of Museums, Government of Tamil Nadu. He has worked on the indigenous speech varieties of Pachaimalai Malayali Tribes (of Tamil Nadu), Kui-Kandha Tribes (of Odisha), Betta Kuruba Tribes (of Karnataka) and Adiyan Tribes (of Kerala) and published extensively in the fields of Comparative Dravidian, Lexicography, Dialectology and endangerment of indigenous cultures and languages. He was UGC Visiting Fellow (2016-2017) at the Department of Dravidian & Computational Linguistics, Dravidian University, Kuppam and currently he is the Senior Fellow of ICSSR, New Delhi at the Department of Linguistics, Bharathiar University, Coimbatore. |  |
| Prof. T. Dharmaraj is Professor of Folklore at the Department of Folklore and Culture Studies, Madurai Kamaraj University, Madurai. He is an Associate Member of the Folklore Fellows, an International network of Folkloristics, Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, Turku. He carried out an ethnographic study on a tribal community called ‘Kaanikarar’ and produced a documentary film on the community. He was involved in collecting tribal and folk visual motifs for a project on ‘Ethno semiotic study on visual representation of folk crafts and arts’ to IGRMS (A museum of Mankind), Bhopal. |  |
| Dr. Sam Mohan Lal was Professor cum Deputy Director at the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Manasagangotri, Mysore. He was also a Visiting Faculty at Faculty of Languages and Linguistics, Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur and in the University of Nanjing, China. He supervised the linguistic and cultural documentation of the Tribal languages spoken in Andaman and Nicobar Islands. He has published on Urali tribe and its language and Pattola- Paniya Pre School Primer. |  |
| Prof. Anvita Abbi is an internationally acclaimed linguist and social scientist for her work on indigenous languages. She received Padma Shri in 2013 from the President of India and the Kenneth Hale Award from the Linguistic Society of America in 2015 for her lifetime contributions to documenting Indian languages. She identified a new language family—the Great Andamanese—a moribund language that is key to understanding the peopling of Asia and Oceania. She has widely published in language typology, language contact, multilingualism, and grammars of tribal languages. She taught Linguistics for almost four decades at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. At present, she is an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Linguistics, at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada and serves as a member of the Expert Committee of the UNESCO World Atlas of Languages. |  |
| Professor Minati Panda is the former chairperson of the Zakir Husain Centre for Educational Studies, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University and she is currently the Director of the National Multilingual Education Resource Consortium (NMRC), JNU. She has been a recipient of both the Fulbright and Commonwealth awards. She was the director of the prestigious JNU-University of Cambridge programme on multilingualism and multiliteracy. She has published extensively in the areas of culture and everyday cognition, multilingual education, language, etc. She was the advisor to the Ministry of Tribal Affairs and the Government of Sri Lanka for multilingual education. Professor Panda was a visiting scholar at Teachers College, Columbia University, Manchester University, University of California San Diego (UCSD), Heidelberg University, Hamburg University, University of Western Ontario, the University of Cambridge and the University of South Australia. |  |
| Dr. Rajesh Kumar is a professor of linguistics in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai. He obtained his PhD in linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining IIT Madras, he taught at IIT Kanpur and IIT Patna in India and at the University of Texas at Austin in the USA. He has been a visiting faculty at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai in India. His book on Syntax of Negation and Licensing of Negative Polarity Items was published by Routledge in their prestigious series Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics in 2006. He has been associate editor of the journal Language and Language Teaching. |  |
| Prof. A.R.D. Prasad is former Professor and Head, Documentation Research and Training Centre (DRTC), at Indian Statistical Institute, Bangalore. He was a Member of DSpace Governance Advisory Board, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA. He conducted more than 50 training workshops in India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tunisia on behalf of UNESCO and in Samoa, Malaysia for Common Wealth of Learning on digital documentation. He was Consultant to UNESCO, Paris and UN-FAO, Rome. Dr. Prasad was a Fulbright Scholar and a member, High Level Committee, National Mission for Libraries, Govt. of India and member, Project Evaluation committee on E-Infrastructure, European Commission, Brussels |  |
| Professor Ramesh C. Gaur is presently working as Dean (Administration), Director & Head- Kala Nidhi Division at Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), New Delhi, Ministry of Culture, Government of India. He is a Fulbright Scholar and is the first Indian nominated as Member- International Advisory Committee (IAC) UNESCO Memory of the World (MoW) Programme (2018-2025) as well as Member UNESCO Global Task Force on Indigenous Languages (2020-2032). Prof. Gaur has also served as member of Expert Consultation Committee for setting up of International Centre on Documentary Heritage (ICDH) in South Korea and Consultative Committee on Digital Dunhuang, China. He was also the First Indian appointed as Chair International Federations of Library Associations (IFLA) Advisory Committee on Cultural Heritage for period 2021-2024. Prof. Gaur has been appointed by Ministry of Culture, GOI as Officer on Special Duty (OSD) for setting up of Indian Institute of Heritage. |  |
| Dr. M.D. Muthukumaraswamy has been serving as the Director of the National Folklore Support Centre, Chennai since its establishment in 1997. As the Director of NFSC he led the prestigious folklore projects such as documentation of oral epics of India, visual art traditions of India, establishment of community archives for indigenous communities, and Fellowships in folklore. The projects were funded by the Ford Foundation and the Tata Trusts. The centre successfully completed a community archive project for Narikuṟavar(Vagri). He has lectured at numerous universities in India and abroad and holds senior visiting professorships at the University of Würzburg, Germany, and the University of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. |  |
| Dr. Nerupama Y. Modwel is Principal Director, Intangible Cultural Heritage Division at the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH). She has overseen the successful completion of a number of research, documentation and workshop projects on performing traditions, indigenous arts, folklore, oral narratives and histories, culinary heritage, as well as extensive cultural mapping along the Ganga River in UP and Bihar, and documentation of the living culture of heritage cities like Varanasi, Gaya and Prayagraj. She is coordinating an ongoing programme of studies on tribal communities across the country. Previously, Nerupama taught at the University of Delhi and Rajasthan University. |  |
| Dr. Sujoy Sarkar is a Lecturer and Junior Research Officer at the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) in Mysuru. Since March 2016, he has also served as the Officer-in-Charge of the Scheme for Protection & Preservation of Endangered Languages at CIIL. Sujoy completed his MPhil focusing on the medium of instruction in primary education for the Toto tribe. He defended his doctoral dissertation on “Linguistic Human Rights and Language Discrimination: A Critical Study of Language in Education Policy for Tribal Education in India.” His research interests encompass various aspects of language education, including: Language Issues in Primary Education for Tribal Areas, Language Policy and Planning, Linguistic Human Rights, Language Endangerment and Revitalization. |  |
| Dr. C. R. Sathyanarayanan was former Joint Director, Anthropological Survey of India and on a short deputations served as Deputy Director in the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Government of India and as Director of the Tribal Research Centre, Ooty, Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu. During service in Anthropological Survey of India, he conducted extensive field studies among the tribal communities in the Nilgiris –Wayanad areas and Anamalai hills of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. He was a Senior Consultant (Research) in the National Commission for Scheduled Tribes, New Delhi in 2022 and a Senior Fellow of the ICSSR at the Department of Anthropology, University of Mysore, Mysuru. |  |
| Mrs. Vasamalli is an eminent Toda writer, poet, social activist, archivist and researcher. She has working on a Toda dictionary and her publication “Maarum Ulagil Maraiyaa Oligal: Thodar Vaaimozhi Ilakkiyathin Oru Thoguppu” is the most authentic as well as critically acclaimed work on the life, culture and literature of Toda community. She has been presenting Toda poetry in major literature festivals across the country. She is an Advisory Board Member, Centre for Oral and Tribal Literature, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi. |  |
| Dr. Tarun Chhabra is the founder of the Toda Nalavaazhvu Sangam and the more recent Edhkwehlynawd Botanical Refuge (EBR) Centre Trust. He is engaged in conserving the traditional heritage of the indigenous Toda people. He has authored over eighty papers, book chapters and articles, that culminated in the magnum opus, The Toda Landscape: Explorations in Cultural Ecology (Harvard University Press; Harvard Oriental Series, vol 79) in 2015. He is a member of the IUCN-SSC Western Ghats Plant Specialists Group. |  |
| Dr. Odiyen Lakshmanan is an independent researcher working extensively on Irula language. He has compiled and published Sappekokal, a collection of indigenous Irula songs accompanied by historical narratives presented in short story format, preserving and sharing cultural heritage of Irulas. He has recently released an audio album titled Emthu Naadu Male Naadu, featuring traditional Irula songs enhanced with original musical compositions, celebrating indigenous music. He is actively involved in preserving indigenous languages, ensuring their continued use and transmission to future generations. |  |
Inaugural Session
Date: 27th Sep, 2024 | Time: 10:00am to 11:30am | Venue: The Westin Chennai
| Event | Details |
|---|---|
| Tamil Thai Vazhthu | |
| Lighting of Kuthuvilaku | |
| Welcome Address | Tmt. G. Laxmi Priya, I.A.S., Secretary to Government, Adi Dravidar and Tribal Welfare Department |
| Keynote Address | Prof.Garapati Uma Maheshwara Rao, Former President, Linguistic Society of India |
| Presidential Address | Tmt. N. Kayalvizhi Selvaraj, Honourable Minister for Adi Dravidar Welfare, Government of Tamil Nadu |
| Vote of Thanks | Thiru. S. Annadurai, C.L.S., Director of Tribal Welfare |
Plenary Session
Date: 27th Sep, 2024 | Time: 12:00pm to 01:30pm | Venue: The Westin Chennai
| Event | Details |
|---|---|
| Keynote Speakers |
Tmt. R. Uma Maheswari, Armed Forces Headquarters Civil Service / Additional Secretary to Government, Adi Dravidar and Tribal Welfare Department Ms. Junhi Han, Chief of Culture Sector, UNESCO Dr. V. Madhan Karky, Karky Research Foundation – Language Computing and Literacy |
Technical Session
Venue: The Westin Chennai
27th September, 2024 – Day 01
| Time | Topic | Speakers |
|---|---|---|
| Session – Hall 1 | ||
| 02:00 – 4:30 pm | Endangered Tribal Languages and Oral Traditions |
Dr. C. Maheswaran, Former Director, TRC Prof. T. Dharmaraj, MKU, Tamil Nadu Prof. Sadhana Naithani, JNU, New Delhi |
| Session – Hall 2 | ||
| 02:00 – 4:30 pm | Teaching and Learning Resources for Tribal Endangered Languages |
Prof. Anvita Abbi, JNU & UNESCO, New Delhi Prof. Sam Mohan Lal, CILL, Karnataka Prof. Minati Pande, JNU, New Delhi |
| Session – Hall 3 | ||
| 02:00 – 4:30 pm | Revitalization of Endangered Languages: New Technologies and New Media |
Prof. A R D Prasad, DRTC, Karnataka Prof. Rajesh Kumar, IIT Madras Thiru. Anand Kanitkar, UNESCO South Asia Regional Office, New Delhi |
Cultural Programme
Date: 27th Sep, 2024 | Time: 06:00pm to 07:30pm | Venue: Government Museum Theatre, Egmore
| Event | Details |
|---|---|
| Tribal Cultural Show | Government Museum Theatre, Egmore |
Technical Session
Venue: The Westin Chennai
28th September, 2024 – Day 02
| Time | Topic | Speakers |
|---|---|---|
| Session – Hall 1 | ||
| 11:30 am – 1:00 pm | Documenting and Archiving Endangered Tribal Languages |
Prof. Ramesh Gaur, IGNCA, New Delhi Dr. M. Muthukumaraswamy, NFC, TN Thiru. Manas Avijit, INTACH, New Delhi |
| Session – Hall 2 | ||
| 11:30 am – 1:00 pm | Scheme for Preservation and Promotion of Tribal Languages |
Prof. Sujoy Sarkar, Special Officer I/C, CILL, Karnataka Dr. C.R. Sathyananan, Former JD, ASI – CRC, Nagpur, Maharashtra Dr. Siddhartha Krishnan, Senior Fellow & Convener, ATREE, Karnataka |
| Session – Hall 3 | ||
| 11:30 am – 1:00 pm | Speech Community and Language Safeguarding Practices: The Scheduled Tribes of Tamil Nadu |
Dr. Tarun Chhabra, NKC, Tamil Nadu Dr. K. Vasamalli, COTL, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi Thiru. Odiyen Lakshmann, Independent Researcher, Tamil Nadu |
Closing Plenary Session
Date: 28th Sep, 2024 | Time: 03:00pm to 04:30pm | Venue: TAG Auditorium, MSSW, Egmore, Chennai
| Event | Details |
|---|---|
| Welcome Address | Tmt. G. Laxmi Priya, I.A.S., Secretary to Government, Adi Dravidar and Tribal Welfare Department |
| Presidential Address | Thiru. T. Udhayachandran, I.A.S., Principal Secretary to Government, Finance Department, Government of Tamil Nadu |
| Valedictory Address | Honourable Thiru. Justice K. Chandru, Former Judge, High Court of Madras, Tamil Nadu |
| Vote of Thanks | Dr. S. Raja Samuel Principal, Madras School of Social Work |
