Bhashavaad 2.0: Where Indian Languages Meet

On August 29–30, Ashoka University’s Centre for Translation, led by Rita Kothari and Arunava Sinha, in collaboration with the New India Foundation, held the second edition of Bhashavaad: National Translation Conference at the India International Centre, New Delhi. The Conference drew about 500 participants — translators, writers, publishers, scholars, students, policy professionals, and general readers. Over two days, the programme moved between the craft and the conditions around it, returning often to one point: translation needs sustainable infrastructure.

Speakers ranged from linguists and critics to publishers and activists: Peggy Mohan, Rana Safvi, Jerry Pinto, Tridip Suhrud, Ritu Menon, A. Revathi, Supriya Chaudhuri, Deepa Bhasthi, and Urvashi Butalia, among other distinguished names. Manish Sabharwal, managing trustee of the New India Foundation and founder at Ashoka University, framed Bhashavaad as the meeting point of institutional projects that aim to broaden public knowledge across languages. Peggy Mohan’s keynote address on translation and the future captured a shifting readership. “For the first time, the demand is coming from the public,” she said, arguing that readers now want to join national conversations in their regional languages rather than rely on English as a gateway.

Select panels on the economics of translation tracked three linked questions: who translates, who pays for it, and how translated work reaches readers. Other sessions, such as ‘(In)visible Translators’, ‘Translating Lives’, and ‘Writing Women, Translating Women’, examined erasure, voice, and (in)effability across languages and lives. ‘Translating Knowledge’ focused on what constitutes knowledge and what moves across texts, forms, disciplines, and systems. While ‘Translation and Copyright’ tackled rights and authorship, especially in the time of AI, ‘Translation, Technology, and Language Futures’ underscored the ethical use of technology towards language justice.

Across discussions, another persistent line returned: editorial credibility still privileges learned speakers over native ones, and that bias limits the circulation of important scholarship and literature, not to mention the structural significations within the dynamic multilingual landscape of India. A Multilingual Translation Reading session, featuring student translators selected from across colleges via a competitive application process, showcased readings in and translations from Manipuri, Kashmiri, Odia, Bengali, and Assamese.

New books and projects unveiled…

On the opening day, the Centre unveiled over ten titles from its publishing partnerships and introduced a set of ongoing series aimed at strengthening connections between source-language authors, translators, and publishers.

Key projects on display included Women Translating Women, a collaboration with Zubaan Books that has produced six titles so far. With each subsequent title, the series seeks to address patterns of omission that have historically silenced women’s voices across languages and bring select writing to the fore for a wider readership. The Centre also showcased the Chronicles series with Penguin Random House India, conceived to commission and place critical non-fiction works in translation. A forthcoming Bengali Short Fiction initiative with Westland Books was presented as an experiment in curating regional short fiction for broader markets. Another series of translating Ashoka University’s faculty’s select scholarship into Hindi with Vani Prakashan signals a necessary university-to-public pipeline intended to move academic work in English into public circulation in the languages of India.

Translation search engine…

The Centre also introduced an expanded version of the resource first unveiled at the inaugural edition last year. The team shared progress on the Bhashavaad: Translation Search Engine (bhashavaad.in) — a searchable database mapping translations across Indian languages. From 14,000 entries last year, the database now holds close to 35,000. Positioned as a practical counterweight to the trade’s discoverability problems, it promises better bibliographies, clearer rights trails, and easier commissioning as it grows in size and scope. For publishers, it is pitched as an editorial aid; for scholars, as a research tool; and for translators, as an archival record.

Bhashavaad 2.0 ended on a note of urgency and possibility. The discussions made clear that translation is both a literary craft and an essential infrastructure, and that its future depends on sustained support across institutions, publishers, and readers. After all, to borrow from 2025 International Booker Prize winner Banu Mushtaq — also the title of the session featuring her co-winning translator Deepa Bhasthi at Bhashavaad 2.0 — ‘No Story is Small’.