The Diplomat
The director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, will visit New Delhi from July 6 to 8 to promote Spanish in India, where Spanish has recently become one of the languages offered in secondary education.
For two days, García Montero will hold working meetings with Indian authorities and a meeting with Hispanists and will present the first translation of Don Quixote into Sanskrit, the classical language of India, the Institute said yesterday in a press release,
According to Cervantes, this visit will help strengthen relations with India, a country with a high demand for Spanish classes, as evidenced by the figures of the center in New Delhi. Inaugurated in 2009, it is currently the center with the highest volume of teaching activity in the network, with almost 300,000 hours per student and more than 6,000 enrollments in the 2021/2022 academic year. To strengthen its presence in India, Instituto Cervantes will open an extension in Bangalore, the fourth largest city in terms of population and considered the country’s Silicon Valley for its numerous technology companies and research institutions, starting in 2023.
The program will begin tomorrow, Wednesday, July 6, with meetings between the director of Cervantes and the president of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, Vinay Sahasrabuddhe, and the director general of the Indian Chamber of Commerce, Rajeev Singh. In the afternoon, García Montero will hold a session with Hispanists at the Cervantes in New Delhi.
Afterwards, the director will present, in the auditorium of the center, the Sanskrit translation of Don Quixote, a work that was promoted by the American book collector Carl Tilden Keller (1872-1955) and carried out by the Brahmins Jaghdar Zadoo and Nityanand Shastri from an 18th century English translation of this work. This volume, edited by the University of Pune and published for the first time, contains the translation of eight chapters of the first part of Don Quixote and presents the Sanskrit translation and the English parts on facing pages. It also includes a description of the reception of Cervantes’ classic in India, a study on the history of its translation and an audiobook read by Professor Shrikant Bahulkar.
In addition to the director of Cervantes and the Spanish ambassador to India, José María Ridao, the event will be attended by the son of the last maraja of Kashmir, the diplomat and writer Karan Singh; the German professor and author of the publication, Dragomir Dimitrov; the grandson of one of the translators, Surindar Nath Pandita; and the professor of Sanskrit and Pali, Mahesh Deokar.
The program of activities of the director of the Instituto Cervantes in India will end on Thursday, July 7, with a literary meeting at Sahitya Akademi, the Indian National Academy of Letters, an entity dedicated to the promotion of literature in the languages of the South Asian country.
