APHASIA, THE FUTURE OF MEMORY?

<strong>Centre for Advanced Studies Centre for the Study of Social Systems</strong> <strong>CAS DISTINGUISHED LECTURE </strong> <strong>Dr. Ganesh Devy</strong> (Chair, People's Linguistic Survey of India) a talk on <strong>APHASIA, THE FUTURE OF MEMORY?</strong> Date : <strong>September 29 2015</strong> <strong>Abstract:</strong> Neurologists explain the current shift in man's cognitive processes by pointing to the rapidly changing ways in which the brain stores and analyzes sensory perceptions as well as information. Linguists have raised alarm about the sinking fortunes of natural languages through which human communication has taken place over the last seven millennia. They have started noticing that the use of man-made memory-chips fed into intelligent machines make heavy dents in the human ability to remember and even the tense patterns of natural languages. Technologists, particularly those astride the leading glory of technology—the ICT—have been talking of network communities as a substitute for civilizations. Collectively, for all nations, all ethnic and cultural groups of humans, the vision of a life well beyond our imagination has started appearing on the horizon even if it has not become fully manifest, making mockery of all that the human brain and mind have so far held as being natural and permanent. In the new experience of the world waiting for all of us, memory as we have so far used is expected to be of little use, and imagination as we have so far exercised is predicted to get entirely transformed. The homo sapiens, it is believed, moving out of memory, imagination and even language, are poised to enter a post-human phase of the natural evolution. Man and the intelligent machine, together, are expected to develop a new image-based system of communication, a new post-human and predominantly externalized memory and a sphere of imagination where multiple frames of existence seamlessly collide. This image of the things to come-- call it a utopia, call it a dystopia—is profoundly unnerving, not because it involves fundamental challenges to the things established; not also because our sense of beauty, ethics and truth will get entirely transformed, but because a lot many communities—ethnic, linguistic, cultural—and a innumerable groups on economic fringes shall have to pay the cost of the transformation by having to face misery, deprivation and extinction. Probably just as the Industrial Revolution and the associated rise of capitalism in European countries placed the traditional agrarian society at risk, giving rise to the long drawn conflicts between labour and capital, this great transition facing us globally will create strife and, consequently, violence of an unprecedented order. This time too the post-human societies are likely to get divided between those with access to the digital and those without it. In our excitement for the utopia of the 'beyond imagination' life and world, it would be tragic if we forgot to look at the struggles and the plight of those who are on the digital fringes. Is Aphasia spread out before us as the future of Memory? <strong>Bio-Data: </strong>Ganesh N. Devy, formerly professor of English at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, a renowned literary critic and activist and is founder director of the Bhasha Research and Publication Center, Vadodara and Adivasi Academy at Tejgadh, Gujarat established to create a unique educational environment for the study of tribal communities. He led the People's Linguistic Survey of India in 2010, which has researched and documented 780 Living Indian Languages. He was awarded Padma Shri on 26 January 2014 in recognition of his work with denotified and nomadic tribe's education and his work on dying-out languages. He was awarded the Sahitya Academy Award for After Amnesia, and the SAARC Writers' Foundation Award for his work with denotified tribal's. He has also won the reputed Prince Claus Award (2003) awarded by the Prince Claus Fund for his work for the conservation of the history, languages and views of oppressed communities in the Indian state of Gujarat. He won the 2011 Linguapax Prize for his work for the preservation of linguistic diversity.