Prof. Ashok Ramachandra Kelkar , who inaugurated the Prof. M.B. Emeneau Centenary International Conference on South Asian Linguistics, is considered the living legend of the Indian Linguistics.

             In his inaugural address, Prof. Kelkar defined conferences as ritual theatres, which unlike the normal theatre has no division between players and play-goers. He stated that in rituals we get to know what the outcome is beforehand in contrast to theatre where the audience are not supposed to know the end priorly.

             In the first part of his inaugural speech, Prof. Kelkar remembered his association with Prof. M.B. Emeneau considering him as the best teacher of historical linguistics. He expressed his disappointment at not being able to have more opportunities to work with him. He also remembered the works he did to commemorate different occasions related with MBE. He called Prof. M.B. Emeneau as the honorary member of the Dravidian family of languages.

            In the second part, he dealt with the area of South Asian Linguistics. He asserted that South Asia was the cradle of linguistics and could be called a Language Museum . Giving his own example, of writing in Marathi, Hindi and English- two South Asian and one Non-South Asian language, he observed that given such backgrounds, South Asian in general and India in particular was the best setting for language studies. He expressed his dissatisfaction about the situation of language studies. Scholars like MBE, he stated, could look at the concepts related to Eastern and Western languages alike, but many people write solely in their mother tongue or English. He urged the linguists to develop an insight that is similar to MBE's model.

           It is time, he said, that we obtained our "swaraj" in Linguistics atleast if not in anything else. With great personalities like Panini, building our grammatical tradition, we should work in the direction of preserving such contributions, he asserted. He stressed that 'knowledge globalization' should not be a euphemism for Westernization, but should be mutual. Prof. Kelkar opined that such practices will make us free to the insights from wherever we want, neither following our ancestors nor westerners.

          In conclusion, he observed that contributions to the linguistic theory should be in a progressive manner, with building of insights.