The 4-day fourth SAARC folklore, poetry and heritage festival opens Friday morning with academic sessions and folk performances. This year's theme is Folklore: Heritage and Identity in the SAARC.

 Scholars from Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Maldives, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Bangladesh, would be discussing latest literary trends and cultural streams.

 Ajeet Cour said, ‘If one drew a line from Afghanistan to Bhutan and another from Kashmir to Sri Lanka and Maldives, one finds that there is no break in communication between any two contiguous points. Communication breaks down only on extreme points of the scale. The break in communication can only be political and not cultural.’

 It is the Indus Valley civilization that defines our roots and identity, she added.

 SAARC's identity emanates from its rich cultural folklore comprising a universe of folk tales, songs, dances, fables, cosmologies, traditional theatre and grandmothers' tales, arts and crafts, myths and legends, paintings, the epics and other rich forms of creative expression, Ajeet Caur said.

"These age-old historical memories are not only alive and vibrant, their sensitivity and rhythm weave a unique kaleidoscopic pattern which is a silent symphony of our lives. A silent stream flowing endlessly in the depth of our awareness and collective cultural and civilization consciousness," she told Agratoday.in.

She said SAARC was perhaps the only region in the world where people celebrated love and marriages, pregnancies and child-births, even deaths with songs. "We have songs for the changing seasons, for harvests and for monsoons. We, the people of the SAARC region have been the original environmentalists since Indus Valley civilization. The folklore of the SAARC region is the collective consciousness of the peoples of these countries," Cour added.

Why a festival of folklore? Cour explained "because the contemporary literature and research and cultural programmes focus on the elite and the intelligentsia, ignoring largely the voice of the masses which can be heard and understood through oral traditions of folklore and folk songs which are lying at the root of historical and cultural memories of the societies of the region. We need to re kindle the new spirit of SAARC and this event will be a unique forum for providing a platform to share, exchange and present the multi-faceted dimensions of culture of the masses."

She said the most urgent job for the SAARC community is to collect, promote, record and study folklore and preserving research in books, films, photographs and in CDs.