KISS Organizes Webinar on Tribal Language and Culture
An enlightening Webinar on “Tribal Language and Culture: A Perspective” was organized by KISS Deemed to be University on 6th August 2020. Experts deliberated on the importance of tribal languages to tribal people and explored the link between language and culture and how they shape their sense of identity. Tribal language enhances cultural knowledge, kinship, song lines and stories reliant on language so that these important cultural elements can be passed on across generations, they opined. There is a need to promote tribal languages as a valuable and historical aspect of India’s cultural heritage and consider how tribal languages can help to bridge the gap on tribal disadvantage, they suggested.
The objectives of the Webinar were to preserve the rich cultural tradition of tribal communities inhabiting all over India, to give a new lease of life to the dying tribal languages, and to explore the theories about the relationship between language and culture.
The Chief Speaker of the Webinar was Padma Shri Dr. Damayanti Beshra. One of the most prominent Santali authors, Dr. Beshra penned an anthology of poems ‘Jiwi Jharna’ in 1994. She was honoured with the Sahitya Akademi Award for her extraordinary anthology ‘Say Sehed’ in 2010 and since 2011, she has been publishing the first Santali women’s magazine ‘Karam Dar’. So far, she has authored over 11 books in the Santali language and five in Odia. She was awarded with the coveted “Padma Shri” award in the year 2020.