South-Indian Horizons
by Jean-Luc Chevillard | 2004 | 309,297 words
This volume, a tribute to François Gros and a celebration of the field of Tamil studies, demonstrates the international nature of this area and its wide range of topics. The contributors stem from sixteen different countries. They are literary historians and critics, philologists, linguists, cultural anthropologists, political and social historians...
Foreword [trl]
"Because it is limited, the act of knowing has by definition a temporal thickness, a horizon of retrospection, as well as a horizon of projection."
S. Auroux [1989: 13]
The studies collected here illustrate the way in which a field of study, that of "Tamil Studies", branches out while preserving a connection. 1 Their authors have this common point of being all, except a small minority, specialists in Tamil - in one or another of its varieties - and of having responded positively when they were invited to contribute to a volume of homage to Franśois Gros. 2 The field of Tamil studies, in its international dimension, 3 was born when Westerners, in historically varied circumstances, made contact with South India. They encountered, as far as language and literature studies are concerned, a lively indigenous tradition, which had produced numerous theoretical texts on itself, the oldest of which is the Tolkāppiyam . The first example of a truly successful synthesis between the indigenous tradition and the effort of external discovery is certainly that of Constantius Joseph Beschi (1680-1747), although he had precursors 4 . From the 19 th century, the work of internationalization of the field of study asserted itself. Translations of Tamil works, studies, grammars, dictionaries, manuals were published in India and in Europe. Articles appeared in scientific, academic or popular journals. The works on Tamil were obviously not isolated from other works, within the same general movement which concerned all of India (or the Indies). To illustrate this position in a broader field, and limiting ourselves here for convenience to what concerns linguistics, we can consider the example of three French academics, whose names are cited respectively 17, 17 and 6 times in the Materials for a Bibliography of Dravidian Linguistics published in 1966 5 by Mikhail Sergeevitch Andronov (born in 1931), namely Julien Vinson (1843-1926), Jules Bloch (1880-1953) and Pierre Meile (1911-1963):
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The first, who had spent his adolescence in Karaikkal, where his father was president of the court of first instance, was, from 1886 to 1921, holder of a chair called "Hindustani and Tamil language" at the School of Living Oriental Languages. However, alongside this activity focused on languages of India, he is also known for work on the Basque language.
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The second, who, in addition to studying Sanskrit at the EPHE, had studied Tamil and Hindi at the École des Langues Orientales Vivantes, had made a long stay in India from Hanoi, where he had been posted from 1906 to 1908 as a member of the EFEO. From 1920, he had been a professor of Langues Orientales Vivantes, in a chair entitled "Modern Languages of India", and director of studies at the EPHE. Finally, from 1937 to 1951, he had been a professor at the Collège de France. He is well known for his work on Marathi, Indo-Aryan, the inscriptions of Ashoka and, with regard to the theme of this volume, his seminal work of 1946 entitled La Structure Grammaticale des Langues Dravidiens .
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The third, a student of the previous one whom he was to succeed in his chair of Oriental Languages, had made his first stay in India from 1936 to 1939. In addition to his work on Tamil, as a linguist and as a historian - an often cited article is that on "The Yavanas in Tamil India" [1941] - he also wrote notes and an introduction to the translation of Gandhi's autobiography, as well as a booklet from the collection Que sais-je? on the History of India [1951].
Besides these three linguists 6 , there are of course other French Tamilists whose names are known internationally, such as Jean Filliozat (1906-1982) or Louis Dumont (1911-1998), who both taught briefly at Langues Orientales, 7 and who represent other scientific fields. The versatility of Tamilists is of course not limited to France and it is also evident in the present volume, as can be seen for example in the contributions of K. Zvelebil and RE Asher, who have written important works in the field of Tamil, but have chosen to offer for this volume articles on neighboring fields: a language of the Nilgiris and an author from Kerala. It is also this openness and the absence of compartmentalization of the field that we wanted to highlight by the title chosen for this collection of South Indian Horizons . One of the expected effects of bringing together a variety of approaches here is to make explicit, for those who are new to the field of study, two horizons: the "horizon of retrospection" and the "horizon of projection." 8 The first horizon is perceived through intellectual filiations, genealogies, and guru-śiṣya paramparā‚ that one senses in certain bibliographies or biographical notices. Of course, to give a more complete vision, it is necessary to add at least a skeleton of lists of names and dates, or to those that we have already mentioned others would be added, each list being of course only a draft that is never complete, as for example
Henrique Henriques (also Anrrique Anrriquez) [1520-1600] 9
Constantius Joseph Beschi [1680-1747] 10
Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg [1683-1719] 11
Francis Whyte Ellis [ca. 1778-1819] 12
Louis Savinien Dupuis [1806-1874]
Louis-Marie Mousset [1808-1888]
Karl Graul [1814-1864] 13
Robert Caldwell [1814-1891] 14
Edouard Ariel [1818-1854] 15
G. U. Pope [1820-1908] 16
Arthur Coke Burnell [1840-1882] 17
Julien Vinson [1843-1926] 18
U.V. Swaminatha Aiyar [1855-1942] 19
Jules Bloch [1880-1953] 20
Alexander Mikhailovitch Mervarth [1886-1937]
P.S. Subrahmanya Sastri [1890-1978] 21
S. Vaiyapuri Pillai [1891-1956] 22
N. Kandaswamy Pillai (Nī. Kantacāmi Piḷḷai) [1898-1977] 23
Léon Saint-Jean (aka Karavelane) [1900-1965] 24
Murray B. Emeneau [born 1904] 25
"Murray" (S.) Rajam [1904-1986] 26
VM Subramanya Ayyar (Vi. Mu. Cuppiramaṇiya Aiyar) [1905-1981] 27
Jean Filliozat [1906-1982] 28
Alain Daniélou [1907-1994] 29
Thomas Burrow [1909-1986] 30
Pierre Meile [1911-1963] 31
Louis Dumont [1911-1998] 32
Mounissamy Naidu [1???-1999] 33
R. Varada Desikan [born in 1923]
list which is extended in some way by the chronological list (by birth order) of the participants in this volume, which can be found in a few pages.
We would like this book to be an opportunity for those who are new to the field of Tamil studies to appropriate the horizon of retrospection of its authors, while clearly perceiving in which directions they are heading. For this reason, the studies have been grouped thematically, in 4 sections:
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The first, which is itself divided into subsections, brings together 16 contributions concerning literature, of which 4 concern devotional literature, 5 contemporary literature, 5 classical literature and 2 popular literature. 34
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The second brings together 10 articles dealing with language issues or relating to language description.
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The third brings together 10 articles from disciplines such as history, epigraphy and archaeology.
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The last section, perhaps the most plural in its content and voices, hence its title, 35 brings together four contributions which relate to cultural history, ethnography, moral sciences, and which are accompanied, as a final submission, by an offering of poems.
Bibliography
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———, 1945, Introduction to Tamil , Oriental and American Bookstore, GP Maisonneuve, Paris.
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Footnotes
1 An ambition of "connectedness in diversity" seems, on reflection, more practicable than that of "unity in diversity".
2 To respect the wishes of Franśois Gros, who preferred to write his own notice (pp. xvii-xx, "My life without me"), this foreword will discuss everyone except the jubilarian.
3 The fountain of knowledge in this field is of course to be found in Tamilland in the texts composed in Tamil by authors, commentators and all those who have had mastery of it by birthright up to the present day. But for students from elsewhere to be able to drink from this fountain, there must be smugglers and lingua francas , as was Latin in C.J. Beschi's time and as is English today, in which the majority (but not all) of the articles in this volume are written.
4 The first Tamil grammar by a European was composed in Portuguese by Henrique Henriques (also spelled Anriquez) around the mid-16 th century. See Vermeer[1982].
5 I accessed this bibliography through Harold Schiffman's online version: <http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/͠haroldfs/dravling/projects/androbib.html>. A comparison with Agesthialingom & Sakthivel [1973] shows a high rate of overlap, with some spelling variations, since Meile's bibliography gains 1 article, while Bloch's also gains 1 but loses 3, Vinson's being unchanged.
6 This designation of "linguists" is not restrictive: I have just tried to show that their talent had multiple facets. I simply emphasize that they were recognized as such by the community of linguists, as shown by the linguistic bibliographies and as also indicated by the very active role of J. Bloch and P. Meile in the Société de Linguistique de Paris.
7 Jean Filliozat taught Tamil between the departure of J. Bloch and the appointment of P. Meile; as for Louis Dumont, he taught for a year after the death of P. Meile. See E. Sethupathy[1995].
8 I borrow these terms from Auroux [1989: 13-14]. The broader context of the quote already given in the epigraph is as follows: "Because it is limited, the act of knowing has by definition a temporal thickness, a horizon of retrospection (Auroux, 1987 b), as well as a horizon of projection. Knowledge (the instances that implement it) does not destroy its past as is often wrongly believed, it organizes it, chooses it, forgets it, imagines it or idealizes it, in the same way that it anticipates its future by dreaming it while it constructs it. Without memory and without a project, there is simply no knowledge.
9 See Vermeer[1982]. The names in the first column of this list are those of Tamilists who worked in a French context. The others, whose names are indented, had no direct connection with French institutions but are given here as chronological references because of their eminence in the field.
10 See Chevillard[1992].
11 See Brijraj Singh[1999] and Asher[1994: vol. 9: 5083-5084].
12 See Asher[1994: vol. 3: 1106-1107] and Pope[1886].
13 See, here, the second foreword by Eva Wilden (p. xxxi, fn. 1)
14 See Asher[1994: vol. 2: 439-440] and Meenakshisundaram [1974: 34-38].
15 Volume 242 of the Journal Asiatique notes laconically, regarding the June 17, 1954 session of the Société Asiatique (Paris): "Mr. Meile gives a communication on the centenary of the death of the Tamil scholar Ariel. Observation by Mr. Filliozat." I do not know if the text of this communication has been published. The papers of the Ariel Fund are today kept in the "Oriental Manuscripts" section of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, in Paris (rue de Richelieu). The most detailed published description that exists is, to my knowledge, that of Gregory James [2000: 198-200]. Some information is also available on the Internet on the site of the Lettre du Cercle Culturel des Pondichériens <http://perso.wanadoo.fr/karikalan/sommaire.htm#Collection>, and notably in No. 22 (December 1998). See also Pope[1886:i] for an appreciation of his work on the Kuṟaḷ .
16 See "Dr. GU Pope", pp. vii-xiii, in Tamil Heroic Poems [1973] & Meenakshisundaram [1974: 55-59].
17 See "Obituary of A.C. Burnell" (by William Dwight Whitney) in The Critic (November 18, 1882) [information provided by Asko Parpola]. A.C. Burnell seems to have been the first to attempt a comparison between the Tolkāppiyam and the Kātantra in his 1875 book: On the Aindra School of Sanskrit Grammarians . In addition, he was involved in palaeography, lexicography (he is one of the authors of the Hobson-Jobson ) and was also active in making Beschi's work better known: GU Pope wrote in 1886, on p. vi of the "General Introduction" to his Kurraḷ , about the Clavis : "The late lamented Dr. A.C. Burnell, MCS (among his very many benefactions to Oriental learning), issued a reprint of this valuable work."
18 See Gros [1982: 94-95] and Rahmat Ali & Markovitch [1995].
19 The great scholar UV Swaminatha Iyer (U.Vē. Cāminātaiyar) corresponded with Julien Vinson from 1891. Vinson copied for him at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris a manuscript of a work he was editing: the Maṇimēkalai . See, in U.Vē. Cāminātaiyar [(1950) 1982: 688-689] and UV Swaminatha Iyer [1994: 476], the account of these epistolary exchanges in his autobiography (in Tamil) published in book form by his disciples after his death and translated into English by K. Zvelebil.
20 For an overview of his work, see Caillat[1985]. Jules Bloch's influence in India, apart from the fact that several of his books have been published there in English translation (see bibliography), can be measured by remarks such as the one found in the biographical notice on PS Subrahmanya Sastri, in the 1997 reissue of his 1934 work. The author of the notice, PN Natarajan, writes: "it was in 1930, during his tenure at the University of Madras, that he was awarded the Ph.D. degree in Tamil for his thesis […] He was the first to be awarded a Ph.D. degree in Tamil by the University of Madras. His thesis was highly commended by scholars of repute like Profs. RL Turner, LD Barnett and J. Bloch." See also Asher[1994: vol. 1: 372].
21 See Natarajan[1997] and Kamatchinathan[2002].
22 See Sivathamby[1988].
23 Bio-data communicated by Mr Srivatsan of the Santi Sadhana Trust, whom I thank here. N. Kandaswamy Pillai was part of the group that worked with "Murray" (S.) Rajam ( cf. infra ). His name is mentioned by Filliozat[1967]. There is an (unpublished) translation of Naṟṟiṇai by him in the IFP library (TA. LIT. CL.168). In addition, he was an active member of the Karantait Tamiḻ Caṅkam‚ published in 1964 an edition of the Tiruvācakam (republished in 1984, Annamalai University) and was also very much involved with the Sarasvati Mahal. According to Venkatachalapathy[2000], he wrote Paḷḷiyakarap Paḻaṅkatai (Tamiḻp Poḻil, 1938).
24 See Karavelane [1956] and K. Madanagobalane [2001]. Pannirselvame (Univ. of Pondicherry) published an article on Karavelane in Rencontre avec l’Inde (pers. comm. of K. Madanagobalane).
25 See Bh. Krishnamurti [1968] and William Bright [1994].
26 See back cover in Vaiṇava Urainaṭai Varalāṟṟu Muṟait Tamiḻp Pērakarāti [2001].
27 See Chevillard[2000]. It should also be noted that VM Subramanya Ayyar, like N. Kandaswamy Pillai ( cf. supra ), was associated with "Murray" (S.) Rajam. He is the author of (unpublished) translations of the Akanāṉūṟu and the Tēvāram (kept in the IFP library). That of the Tēvāram will be published soon in the form of a CD-ROM ( Digital Tevaram , IFP, forthcoming).
28 See Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat [1991].
29 Better known as a musicologist (see http://www.alaindanielou.org/), Alain Daniélou has published under his signature translations of Tamil classics which seem to have been made by others and formatted by him. We give the references in the bibliography.
30 See Asher[1994: vol. 1: 346-347]
31 See Bonifacio[1965] and Désoulières[1995]. I have tried to gather here, in this foreword and in the bibliography attached to it, a certain amount of information and pointers to sources of information, but it is certain that P. Meile is less well known than his master Jules Bloch, one of whose posthumous works he edited, with C. Caillat, which appeared in 1963. An indication of the insufficient degree of circulation of information in India concerning certain French works is the slightly imprecise nature of the obituary concerning him in volume XXXI of the Journal of Oriental Research (Kuppuswami Sastri Research Institute, Mylapore, Madras): "Prof. Pierre Melle ( sic !) (1911-1963) was teaching at the Ecole de Langues Orientales in Paris. Besides his equipment in Sanskrit and Indology he was also devoted to modern Indian Languages including the Dravidian. Among his works are the Mythology of the Tamils and an Introduction to Tamil ." The spelling mistake in his name is faithfully reproduced in the tables published in 1989, which list the information contained in volumes I-XLI (1928-1981). Professor VI Subramoniam once suggested to me that French Tamil scholars should write a book in English on French work in the Tamil field and that such a book would certainly be useful. Reading the notice by Pierre Meile that I have just mentioned convinced me that at least a website would be necessary.
32 See Reiniche[1979], and in particular his bibliography, to get an idea of the extent of the field.
33 See dedication, p. 4, in Gros & Kannan [2002].
34 This division is of course imperfect and to some extent arbitrary. For example, Indira Peterson's article is actually on the divide, since it deals in a way with the imprint of devotional literature on modern literature. And E. Annamalai's article could of course have been placed in the second section.
35 F. Gros wrote in 1968 (p. III): "... one can try to translate paripāṭal by ´mixed song´, a sort of potpourri analogous to the famous satura of old Latin literature."
36 The dates in parentheses correspond to editions that I was unable to obtain. Any superscripts appearing before the dates indicate the edition number of the volume consulted.
37 An autobiography or the story of my experiments with truth , by MK Gandhi. Transl. by Mahadev Desai.
Author
Jean-Luc Chevillard (b. 1956) had his initial training in Mathematics in the École Normale Supérieure (Paris) before switching to the field of linguistics. After a stay in South India, where he had the opportunity to study Tamil with Prof. Muttu Shanmugam Pillai (1920-1998), he decided to specialize in the History of Tamil Grammatical tradition and wrote his thesis on one of the commentaries of Tolkāppiyam . He was recruited by the École Franśaise d'Extrême-Orient (EFEO), and then by the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) where he is currently "research manager" (UMR 7597, HTL). He has published a translation of Cēṉāvaraiyam (1996) and a number of articles, and is currently editing a CD-ROM ( Digital Tēvāram ) with SAS Sarma. He is the Editor of the bi-annual linguistics journal History Epistemology Language and has been the main editor for this volume. He is also currently preparing a translation of the Neytal section of Akanāṉūṟu in collaboration with Eva Wilden.