The home of Thunchath Ramajujan Ezhuthachan, the patriarch of the Malayalam language, at Tirur is set to host a four-day international conference on the Indian epic Mahabharata from Thursday.
The Thunchan Memorial Trust is organising the global meet. Scholars from Germany, Sri Lanka, China, France and the US will come down to discuss the infinite diversity of the Mahabharata readings.
They will interact with Indian scholars and artists from Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Kashmiri, Sanskrit, Gujarati, Bangla, Odiya, English and Malayalam languages.
Festival-cum-seminar
Sri Lankan scholar Shanmughalingan will inaugurate the festival-cum-seminar at Thunchanparamba on Thursday morning. He will speak on the ‘living tradition of the Mahabharata in Sri Lanka’.
Novelist C. Radhakrishnan will deliver the keynote address on ‘Mahabharataanusheelanam’. Jnanpith laureate and the chief host M.T. Vasudevan Nair will release a new critical edition of ‘Thunchath Ezhuthachante Mahabharatam’ penned by P.M. Vijayappan.
Ashuthosh Dayal Mathur, Sanskrit scholar from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi, will speak on ‘the Mahabharata in the Sanskrit poetry tradition’.
C. Rajendran, former head of Sanskrit Department at Calicut University, will speak on Sanskrit plays based on Mahabharata. Azarmi Dukht Safavi, director of the Institute of Persian Research at Aligarh Muslim University, will speak on the Mahabharata tradition in Persian.
Ajah Shekhar from Sree Sankara Sanskrit University, Kalady, will speak on the subaltern perspectives on the Mahabharata.
Malayalam scholar Sunil P. Ilayidom will speak on the Mahabharata and the imagination of the freedom movement.