National Tribal Literary Festival Ends With 27 Languages

The Ministry of Tribal Affairs brought its two-day National Tribal Literary Festival to a close at the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi on 13 November 2026. Tribal writers, poets, linguists, researchers and scholars from across the country spent the two days on a single question: how the spoken word of forest and hill villages can move into print without losing what makes it distinct. The festival was held as part of the Janjatiya Gaurav Diwas celebrations and carried the theme From Oral Tradition to Contemporary Tribal Literature.

Oral epics on the closing day

The first session of the final day, moderated by Shri Prakash Jha, turned to oral epics and heroic traditions. Speakers took up the literary inheritance of the Bhil and Gond communities, among them the Gond Ramayana and the Bhil Mahabharata, and from Manipur the Wari Leeba storytelling form and the Khamba-Thoibi epic. The panel asked that such forms be held in place through audio-visual recording and research, and that village storytellers be treated as custodians of a literary heritage rather than as mere sources of information.

Indigenous languages in the classroom

A second session, moderated by Dr. K. Srinivasa Rao, a former Secretary of the Sahitya Akademi, examined what community knowledge can do for multilingual schooling. Speakers argued for songs, stories and oral narratives to enter early childhood education, so that a child's mother tongue and cultural identity are strengthened rather than set aside. Documentation, translation and technology were named as the supports that tribal languages most need.

New writers and new platforms

Two further sessions gave space to story and poetry readings by emerging tribal writers, chaired by Shri Mahadev Toppo and moderated by Smt. Jogamaya Chakma. At the valedictory session Smt. Ranjana Chopra, Secretary in the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, described Living Roots Originals, built with the Indian Performing Right Society (IPRS) to protect the creative rights of tribal musicians and performers. She also announced a dedicated tribal literature section at the National Book Trust's coming book fair at Pragati Maidan. Summing up, Dr. Rao counted 27 languages at the festival, of which 23 were tribal languages, and pressed for tribal writing to enter university syllabuses, translation programmes and mainstream publishing. Shri Ganesh Nagarajan, Deputy Secretary in the Ministry, closed the proceedings, which the Ministry placed in the spirit of Ek Bharat Shreshtha Bharat, Vikas bhi, Virasat bhi and Viksit Bharat@2047.