A space for multilingual imagination.
Channapatna is perhaps a name you have most likely associated with the famous Channapatna toys. Comprising a wide variety of characters, they carry a myriad of stories within themselves — of occupations, festivals, bodies and histories. The stories Hyphen talks of are found everywhere. In entities beyond the written word — in people and their crafts. While we are of course not reducing the people of a place to a symbol, there is much to learn about what falls conventionally outside of literature and how we may bring it back into its folds, not through sermonising but gentle nudging.
And that is precisely what we attempted to do with one of the activities we conducted at the Government 1st Grade College in Channapatna.
Students were asked to choose a constitutional right or ideal — say freedom of speech, right to equality, justice — and express its essence through a story. Students crafted stories in English using fictional and personal incidents that may or not have occurred in the same language. Through this activity, we intended to provoke students to think of how we think of formal, legal language as having its home in English alone. And, how do these daunting ideals translate into stories of the seemingly mundane? One student, for example, narrated a story of a little child serving tea to a teacher while he takes a class on the Right to Education. A tale of simple irony, here, evoked the gravitas of imperative legality.
Just as we were leaving the college, we heard students singing folk songs in Kannada during their break. A group of four stood near the compound wall, bobbing their heads and grooving to the song. Channapatna presented us with stories at every step, and we were more than happy to listen.
