CGNet’s involvement with the people of central India has
brought it to the Indira Gandhi National Tribal University for the third
conference on Gondi language standardization. We will be keeping you updated as
events progress here.
The Indira Gandhi National Tribal University is hidden in
the hills near Amarkantak. To get here you must take a jeep some ten kilometres
up through the forest and the hills. The road is very bad but the view is very
good.
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| Good View |
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| Bad Road |
The university is brand new - so brand new, in fact, that much
of it is still being built – and it was founded to aid in the preservation and
of study of tribal cultures and to contribute to the broader field of tribal
welfare. It currently has around three thousand students and a hundred teaching
staff spread across twenty three departments (with plans for many more in the
coming years).
What better place to hold this conference in?
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| (Noted: symbolic resonances between work of building the university and the work of building a standardized version of Gondi) |
The conference begins tomorrow and there are all sorts of
last minute details to finalize. Roughly one hundred delegates from across six
states will be attending and, as exciting as this is for our project, it also
involves plenty of unexciting but necessary things (like organizing accommodation,
meals and transportation for one hundred delegates).
Luckily, we have this neat office/‘conference command hub’ to
work from. We are all working hard and we have plenty of chai. And, floating in over the hills, is the music and singing of local adivasi villages celebrating Diwali.
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| Shubhranshu hard at work |
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