MUMBAI, Nov. 19 -- "We are living through troubled times. We will have to safeguard India's cultural and academic autonomy," renowned Gujarati litterateur and academician Sitanshu Yashashchandra said on Monday, at a literary event hosted by the Chetana Shikshan Sanstha, in Bandra, to commemorate the memory of Marathi poet Vinda Karandikar. Yashashchandra continued, "I would like to address the issue of cultural autonomy in my own humble way in the near future." When asked if the strife-torn India can turn to Gandhi and draw sustenance from his philosophy, he said, "Gandhiji's path is pretty difficult. You will have to throw yourself fully into it. You will have to sacrifice yourself. Shahadat ke liye kya hum taiyyar hain? (Are we ready for martyrdom ?)" Writers, academicians and students turned up in large numbers at the event which evoked blurred memories of Mumbai which helped deepen, between the two World Wars, the Marathi-Gujarati bond in multiple ways -- trade, theatre, music and literature. Speaking on the sidelines of the event, Yashashchandra pointed out that as creative autonomy was democracy's heartbeat, artists and writers should feel free to express their views. "We need to have multiple voices in our public discourse. There can't be a vigorous debate with someone who agrees with you on every point," he said. "We treat our language with violence. The more we torture our language the more it will slip into its shell," said Yashashchandra, a Fulbright scholar and one of post-1960 Indian literature's rebel writers who infused modern sensibilities into the tired veins of Gujarati literature. His plays such as 'Lady Lalkunwar', 'Vaishakhi Koyal', and 'Aa Manas Madrasi Laage Chche', and 'Jatayu', and 'Wakhaar' (both collections of poetry) are considered landmark works in Gujarati. He translated Romanian-French playwright Eugene Ionesco's 'Macbett' into Gujarati, and conducted the satire's comparative study with Shakespeare's original play. Yashashchandra was briefly associated with the University Grants Commission and Sahitya Akademi. Talking about his concerns as a writer at 85, Yashashchandra said, "Language is my chief concern - all Indian languages. Language needs to be nourished and nurtured with great love. Independence saw the rise of the underprivileged class seeking opportunities in administration, education and politics. However, in this unprecedented socio-political churn language was neglected. I think we need to till the soil if we want a rich harvest of literature which is suffused with compassion and contemplation." Stating that the Right-Left divide in the country's public sphere was in no way helping deepen democratic content and harmony, Yashashchandra said he had kept himself away from the two ideological extremes. "The Marxists are intolerant of those who disagree with them, and similar is the case with right-wing votaries. Both are spitting images of each other." Yashashchandra himself has been fortunate enough to have escaped the ire of right-wing as well as the Left adherents in Gujarat, despite the fact that he refused to accept a prestigious literary award from a spiritual guru from that state, known for his pro-Hindutva leanings. "Yashashchandra is one of India's voices of reason and pluralism," said Deepak Doshi, editor, 'Navneet Samarpan', a prestigious Gujarati periodical brought out by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. While sipping ginger 'chai' with publisher Ramdas Bhatkal, writer Nitin Rindhe and officials of the Chetana Shikshan Sanstha, Yashashchandra described himself as "pucca Mumbaikar", and remembered Marathi poets Namdeo Dhasal, Arun Kolatkar and Narayan Surve. Later, in a speech on Indian poetics, Yashashchandra discussed issues germane to exploration and concealment in poetry, furnishing citations from sources as extensive as Chhandogya Upanishada, Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the Anekantvaad of Jainism to buttress his point that language takes on many forms and styles, and is engaged in a series of guerrilla warfares. "It would be dangerous to believe in a single truth. Such a belief will lead to a central, monolithic centre of power," he said. Yashashchandra ended his speech by reading out the Gujarati translation, done by him, of Dalit ideologue Keshav Meshram's Marathi poem....