Dr. Sujatha Vijayaraghvan is a Reader in the Department of English in Pondicherry University . The paper presented by her in Prof. M. B Emeneau Centenary International Conference on south Asian Linguistics is titled "Double Voiced Discourse: Karna Parampara Katha or the Orally Narrated Tale in Tamil. This paper focuses on the nature of the orally narrated tales in general, in the Tamil perspective.

      She opines that an orally narrated tale absorbs the social ethos and events of the age and keeps changing from time to time. The flexibility inherent in these tales makes it dialogic, so that the same story may signify new meanings of the older story or even create radically opposite meanings. Ms. Vijayaraghvan illustrates her paper with many citations of Oral Narrations in Tamil, to highlight the variations between different versions of these tales, the quality of satire and effects of narrative imagination. She also asserts the matrix developed between the narrator and the listener of these tales. Her paper emphasizes the quality of humor laced with every episode and asserts that the orally narrated tale is irrepressible.

      In conclusion, Oral tale has an existence that challenges time and as a result of changing time, the language also changes, thus forcing a change in tales of oral tradition. Therefore the privilege of the authorship of the orally narrated tale lies with all people of all times. It can be said of the Oral tales that they enable the epistemological and semantic conversions that delight and instruct at the same time.

     In the discussion that followed the session, chaired by Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn, Dr Rajendra Singh observed that despite the Idea that proverbs are culturally specific, what he found in a study is that 65% of proverbs were understood cross-culturally. So, if proverbs are understood with that ease, whorf-sapir hypothesis is irrelevant here. To which Dr. Sujatha Vijayaraghvan replied that She had not thought from this angle. Replying to Dr. Pattanayak's question as to why the term semi-literary genre was used in her paper, Dr. Vijayaraghvan said that the Karna Parampara Katha has no text- it is fluid. Moreover, she faced a lot of opposition having used the term 'literary' earlier. Prof. Agnihotri asked what she said about the problem of students who come for admission with English as their mother tongue to which Dr. Vijayaraghvan answered that in such circumstances her department has to depend on their knowledge of other languages such as Tamil or Malayalam. Prof. Malshe expressed his concern for the teacher's end on one hand and the student's end on the other. Replying him Dr. Vijayaraghavan said that she could not ignore the students who come traveling thousands of miles from Africa and France . S.S. Bhattacharya asked whether the students coming for admission had a creole situation, to which Dr. Vijayaraghavan's reply was that a number of creole students are in Pondicherry who know English or French or both the languages.