G. N. Devy

Ganesh N. Devy or Devy, Ganesh Narayan Das ( 1 August 1950), formerly professor of English at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, a renowned literary critic and activist and is founder director of the Bhasha Research and Publication Center, Vadodara and Adivasi Academy at Tejgadh, Gujarat established to create a unique educational environment for the study of tribal communities. He led the People's Linguistic Survey of India in 2010, which has researched and documented 780 Living Indian Languages. He was educated at Shivaji University, Kolhapur and the University of Leeds, UK. Among his many academic assignments, he has held fellowships at Leeds University and Yale University and has been a Jawaharlal Nehru Fellow (1994–96).

Since 2002, he was a professor at the Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology.(DA-IICT), Gandhinagar. As of now he has left DA-IICT and started his career again in Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda . From Baroda he moves to Dharwad to continue his map of the world's linguistic diversity.

He was awarded Padma Shri on 26 January 2014 in recognition of his work with denotified and nomadic tribes education and his work on dying-out languages. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for After Amnesia, and the SAARC Writers’ Foundation Award for his work with denotified tribals. He has also won the reputed Prince Claus Award (2003) awarded by the Prince Claus Fund for his work for the conservation of the history, languages and views of oppressed communities in the Indian state of Gujarat. His Marathi book Vanaprasth has received six awards including the Durga Bhagwat Memorial Award and the Maharashtra Foundation Award. Along with Laxman Gaikwad and Mahashweta Devi, he is one of the founders of The Denotified and Nomadic Tribes Rights Action Group (DNT-RAG). He won the 2011 Linguapax Prize for his work for the preservation of linguistic diversity.

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