Ravikant is a bilingual historian, writer and translator. His collaboratively edited books include Translation Partition, Deewan-sarai01:media vimarsh://hindi janpad and Deewan-e-sarai02: Shaharnama. He is currently researching ‘Words in Motion Pictures: A social History of Language of ‘Hindi’ Cinema. An Associate Fellow at CSDS, he also works with its Bharatiya Bhasha Karyakram and its peer-reviewed journal Pratiman.
“The primary impulse behind any activity – whether research, translation, writing or publishing – is to share. It is a creative process of taking knowledge from one sphere into another. The sphere here could be seen as one constituted by language, profession or technology. The hindi public domain with which I am most familiar is marked by a huge hunger for quality material – so practically everything good that is published in Hindi gets read. We started with the assumption that there are readers of non-literary academic stuff and we have not been proved wrong. We take translation from English and other Indian languages seriously, as a necessary and rigorous practice and we give due importance to translators. We take a lot of care in the production and design of the texts before taking the camera-ready texts to our partner-publishers who also double up as distributors. We add the proviso in the contract that our publications will be available online for free download. This ensures that our genuine readers do not suffer from non-availability on account of failure of distribution or an assumed shelf-life. A burgeoning network, indeed a whole ecology of seminars, workshops, book discussions and online activities sustain our kind of work as authors, researchers, editors and translators.”