Akshya Saxena will deliver a lecture on ‘Multilingualism Beyond Countability or, How Languages Live’. It will be chaired by Ravi Sundaram.

Wednesday, 29 October 2025, 4 pm, Seminar Room and Zoom.

What is lost when a language is lost? How might we read in the face of language loss? This talk moves from my first book, Vernacular English, to my current project, Linguistic Utopias: Reading Lost Languages in the Global South, to imagine the lives of languages without script, states, or speakers. Through Hindi poet Jacinta Kerketta’s Angor (2016), I consider how poems written in Hindi/English remediate linguistic “phonocide” by envisioning language as material. Reading Angor alongside questions of translation, literacy, and mediation, the talk rethinks multilingualism as a method for tracing how languages persist amid their displacement.

Akshya Saxena is an Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India (Princeton UP, 2022, winner 2023 Modern Language Association’s Prize for an Outstanding First Book), and an editor of Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice (U of California P, 2023).

Ravi Sundaram is Professor at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi.

Link to join the lecture online: https://bit.ly/3WC9UKP

ZOOM ID: 86261226812          PASSCODE: csdsdelhi