Maharani's Arts College

The Maharani’s Arts College, Mysuru, as we all know, was established in the early twentieth century under the educational reforms of the Wodeyar era. Both the university itself and the city of Mysuru have a long and rich history with literary expression and the arts. For Hyphen Connects to enter and inhabit a space such as this was exhilarating. Despite examinations, students were intrigued about our work and were more than willing to engage with us for the hour or so we were there.

The Just-A-Minute session that we conducted here (each participant was asked to speak for a minute, in their mother tongues about their relationship with Mysuru) embodied Mysuru’s history of multilingualism — from Kannada to Malayalam to Lambadi. The ‘Tourist-Translator-Local’ exercise, where each participant had to take up the role of one of the three and enact an everyday situation that requires translation, also displayed the phonetic and semantic similarities that these languages had that made translation easy in some cases and obvious dissonances that made it challenging.

All of these activities formed a microscopic reflection of Mysuru itself, thronging with variety and vitality.