HYDERABAD: Politely turning down the request of the organisers, noted author Mridula Garg choose to speak in Hindi at the opening session of Day 2 at the Hyderabad Literary Festival on Saturday. "I was told that many attending the event here do not understand Hindi and I should therefore speak in English. But then, it isn't like everybody understands English either," Garg quipped, as she went on to highlight the plight of Hindi literature and its still-standing custodians."I did not find a single copy of my books in the city," the writer, who has close to two dozen books to her credit, joked, though her concern about the fading sheen of Indian languages was rather grave. Hindi, incidentally, is the language in focus at the three-day literary gathering."Each time I write a book, I am asked when its English translation would be out. And people very unapologetically confess that they aren't well-versed in Hindi to read the original," she said. Recollecting a recent visit to Agra, she added: "While I went there hoping to see a large crowd, considering it is part of the Hindi heartland, barely a few people turned up. The stands were filled the moment a humourist walked in," the Sahitya Akademi Award winner (2013) rued. However, she confessed that such challenges seldom compel an author to stop writing. "Writing is like an addiction, you cannot stop," she candidly put.But Garg's observation about Indian languages rapidly losing readership didn't seem to find support from other participating authors at the event. On the contrary, a section of writers felt that the novelist's views mirrored the perception of the 'elite class' alone. At the grassroots level, the story was entirely different, they felt."This trend might be true of Delhi, but in various other parts of India there is tremendous demand, not just for Hindi but also other languages of the country," stressed poet Rati Saxena, who has been organising poetry festivals for several years now. "Even today, 80 per cent of India enjoys reading in Indian languages though they would have undergone English-medium education," the artist from Kerala said while, however, highlighting that this problem of perception was rooted in the attitude of publishers towards writings in regional scripts."If you look closely, you'll notice that publishers are only willing to market books based on social/economical/political subjects that are used for research. Other books, especially Hindi poetry, don't impress them much," Saxena added, refusing to put the blame on readers. "Even at this festival, there are just two sessions on Hindi (which is the language in focus) and that's possibly because the organisers weren't confident of pulling crowds for these events. But the turnout this morning seemed to say otherwise," she said.Garg also attracted some uncomfortable reactions from her contemporaries for restricting her talk on 'Kriti Aur Kritikar' (art and artist) to novels and stories alone. "Hindi literature isn't just about that. There is poetry, theatre and other forms of work too," said moderator of the session Nand Kishore Acharya, a prominent figure in Hindi literature himself, who is currently a professor at IIIT-Hyderabad And while he did expect more focus on the varied aspects of writings in Hindi, Acharya confessed that he was happy that commercial filmmakers hadn't tried to "reproduce" any Hindi literature on celluloid. "If Ram Leela and Omkara is how Shakespeare is interpreted by these people, then it is best that works in Hindi have been spared," he unabashedly said.