Dr. K. Narayan Devaraiah represents the Central Institute of Indian Languages in Dr. M. B. Emeneau Centenary International Conference on South Asian Linguistics. The paper presented by him is titled " India as a Literary Area" and analyses the concept of linguistic area in this background.

              Dr. Narayan establishes that Emeneau excluded lexical diffusion which is not central to the investigation of linguistic areas based on the idea that lexical items are found to diffuse between any two languages whether or not they are parts of linguistic area. The other condition he lays down is that a language belonging to a family whose languages outside the area do not have the feature, leads to the question of the feature not being reconstructable as belonging to the protolanguage of that family. He affirms that Dr. Emeneau's theory on Dravidianization of Sanskrit, throws some light on the question of hegemony of the origin of Aryans. Citing the postulates of Dr. Emeneau, Iravati Karve and Romila Thapar, Dr. Narayan explains the "limital zones" of the Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages and the assimilation aspects.

             Giving examples of different traditions of worships, Dr. Narayan states that the Indian nationalistic literature appears to be hurriedly categorized and national literature is more than its regional parts.

           Explaining Karnataka as the meeting zone of Aryan and Dravidian language and culture, Dr. Narayan analyses the history of Karnataka under the influence of different empires like Shatavahana and Maurya dynasties. He states that Sufi works were not a part of Kannada literature until it was recognized four years ago.

           Dr. Narayan also elucidates the problems of considering India as a Literary Area. The major problem, he says, lies in the availability of literary texts in translations. The other problem stated is the one of undertaking literature in different languages in the background of knowledge of that text production in spite of knowing their origin either as Sanskritic or Dravidian in nature. He cites many points to highlight the situation of literature in the South-Indian languages and analyses the possibilities of extending the Sanskrit literary theory to modern literary production of various other modern Bhasha literature, by way of accommodating and evaluating "India as a Literary Area".

           In conclusion, Dr. Narayan through Emeneau's concept of 'India as a linguistic area' analyses the potentials of regarding "India as a Literary Area" and asserts that literary production in each language has its own socio-political and religious bearing upon and observes that unless they are properly contextualized and connected to the literary production it is difficult to assess them.

           In the discussion that followed the session, Dr. P. P. Giridhar raised questions on Iravati Karve characteres India as a Hindu nation; the second question was that it seemed to him that India as a Linguistic Area must be seen in two ways-either we say there is a commonality in socio-cultural ethos or world or we say we are in common in terms of methods and strategies we adopt to depict our thoughts in literary forms. Replying to these queries, Dr. Narayan asserted that what Dr. Giridhar said about Iravati was incorrect and answering the second question, he said that he was seeking the problems of these commonalities rather than what were the commonalities.