Keynote Address

April 6 – April 8, 2023, Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), Bengaluru

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The City: Inside the Mind and Outside – Ganesh Devy

Prof. Ganesh N Devy: Critic, Thinker, Editor, Educator, Activist

The most remarkable foundation of the city as a sociological institution is that it is profoundly ‘anti-national’. One is not describing here the city as a traitor, or as ‘a criminal in the eyes the given national code of law.’ What is meant here is that the historical process of the formation of nations –the nation as a political institution – has been very different from the historical process of the formation of the city as a sociological institution. The nation is an expression of the human race to bring many under a single and well-defined space. The city, on the other hand, is the expression of the desire to bring one into many chronological orders.

Ganesh N. Devy (1 August 1950) is a thinker, cultural activist and an institution-builder best known for the People’s Linguistic Survey of India and the Adivasi Academy created by him. He writes in three languages – Marathi, Gujarati, and English. His first full length book in English After Amnesia (1992) was hailed immediately upon its publication as a classic in literary theory. Since its publication, he has written and edited close to 90 influential books in areas as diverse as Literary Criticism, Anthropology, Education, Linguistics and Philosophy.

G. N. Devy was educated at Shivaji University, Kolhapur and the University of Leeds, UK. Among his many academic assignments, he held fellowships at University of Leeds and Yale University and has been THB Symons Fellow (1991-92) and Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow (1994–96). He was a Professor of English at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Vadodara (1980-96). In 1996, he gave up his academic career in order to initiate work with the Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNT) and Adivasis. During this work, he created the Bhasha Research and Publication Centre at Vadodara, the Adivasis Academy at Tejgadh, the DNT-Rights Action Group and several other initiatives. Later he initiated the largest-ever survey of languages in history, carried out with the help of nearly 3,000 volunteers and published in 50 multilingual volumes.