Detailed presentation of Indology at FIP

Indology can be defined as the study of any old or recent aspect of Indian civilization that is supported by an analysis of textual sources written in an Indian language, of iconographic sources or of any other document. Historically, since its beginnings in the XIXth century, the core of Indology has consisted in the study, on strong philological bases, of the very rich existing corpus of texts written in Sanskrit, the scholarly language of India for more than two thousand years, and also the "Latin of Asia" during several centuries.

The Department of Indology of the French Institute of Pondicherry started at the time of the foundation of this Institute with the Treaty of Cession of Pondicherry by France in 1955. The only European establishment of this type set up in India, and having always worked in close co-operation with the Pondicherry centre of "Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient", it allows Western indologists, primarily Sanskritists, to come and work for long periods with traditional Indian scholars (pandits) employed by the Institute, who are repositories of the knowledge and of the ways of working and reasoning, elaborated during centuries by Indian civilization. IFP has a unique character of being a meeting and exchange place between Western and Indian intellectual traditions, at a time when Indian traditional teaching based on transmission from master to disciple is beginning to fade.

The other major originality of the department of Indology of IFP lies in the richness of the collection of manuscripts and photographs gathered since its creation. IFP has 8,600 bundles of palm-leaf manuscripts and 1,150 bundles of transcripts on paper, the majority of the texts being in Sanskrit; the heart of the collection consists in the richest collection in the world of manuscripts relating to Shaivasiddhanta, a trend of Hinduism, which has existed in Tamil Nadu for more than ten centuries. The uniqueness of this collection has been recently underscored by its inscription in the “Memory of the World” programme of the UNESCO. At the iconographic level, the photo library of IFP has 1,30,000 photographs of temples and sculptures which make of it the most significant existing collection of negatives on religious art in South India.

The richness of the collection of texts and images and the presence of traditional Indian scholars contribute to make IFP a preferential place for preserving, transmitting and studying Indian cultural heritage in its material and intellectual forms.

The research projects presented here aim at better using these exceptional assets of IFP. They are divided into three main research orientations:

• Indian analyses of Sanskrit language and literature
• History of shaivism in South India
• Tamil studies

1/ Indian Analyses of Sanskrit Language and Literature

the will to understand from inside the conceptions of Sanskrit language and literature developed by Indian thinkers during centuries. In this field, the collaboration between Indian scholars and Western researchers, particular to the IFP, is necessary since only the former know all the subtleties of Indian analyses and the latter must endeavour to understand them so that they can make it intelligible to the Western public trained in other conceptions.

A major specificity of the Indian intellectual tradition lies in the importance attached to commentaries: in India, all great religious, philosophical or literary texts are subject to commentaries which are intended to clarify it and to supplement it; far from constituting a minor genre, the commentaries form an essential part of the history of ideas in India, giving place in turn to other commentaries. It is thus logical that the department of Indology devotes great attention to these type of texts.

The most significant project of this research orientation, by its extent, its progress and the number of people involved, is the Dictionary of the Examples of Paninian Grammar, a joint project between EFEO and IFP. In India, Sanskrit grammar occupies a central position, constituting the basis and the origin of other intellectual disciplines; towards the IVth century BC, Panini described and codified Sanskrit language in a grammar written in the form of several thousands of rules, the extreme conciseness of which makes it necessary to take resort to explanatory commentaries. The Dictionary of the examples of Paninian grammar brings together and analyzes nearly 40,000 examples given in four commentaries of the grammar of Panini (spread over the period from IInd century BC to XVIth century) to illustrate and explain the rules of formation of words and sentences; it is divided into eight sections, in accordance with the structure of the commentary which is still in use today in South India for teaching Sanskrit grammar and is thus well-known to the pandits of Pondicherry. Apart from its value as a reference work for Sanskritists and indologists, this dictionary, thanks to a system of cross-references between Sanskrit and Western grammatical terminologies, will be more largely useful to linguists and philosophers of the language (who have shown a growing interest for several years in the study of the first scientific grammar and its modes of reasoning).

This great "grammatical" project of IFP is complemented by an ambitious project of bringing out an encyclopaedia of the doctrines of philosophy of language developed in India, dealing with the way in which the meaning of a statement is conceived, expressed and understood. Whereas the grammarian starts from words to construct and understand the meaning of a sentence, the philosopher takes the sentence like a significant unit, which he then breaks up into words; two different approaches of language are thus to be found in the dictionary and the encyclopaedia. One of the most respected Indian logicians heads this project based on the analysis of several tens of treaties, where the most varied views on these particularly difficult questions are exposed. In this project, attention is also given to the possible applications of some of these Indian analyses of the language for the development and the improvement of natural languages and for computational linguistics, fields of research under full development today in various Indian institutes of research.

2/ History of Religions

This second research orientation uses fully the unique patrimonial resources of IFP on Shaivism, the trend of Hinduism thriving South India, which grants preeminence to god Shiva.

Most of the personnel employed in this orientation are interested in the sources of the History of the Shaivism in South India. Work is undertaken in two complementary directions: the cataloguing and digitizating of the manuscripts, on one hand, the edition and close study of texts, on the other. Preservation and analysis of the manuscript collection are thus carried out in parallel.

After having published four Catalogues of its manuscripts, IFP began a few years ago to scan its fragile collection (difficult to preserve in the South Indian climate), and to undertake the electronic cataloguing of manuscripts. This descriptive cataloguing, which represents a first analysis of the contents of the texts, requires specific skills (good knowledge of Shaivasiddhanta, familiarity with the handwritten forms of the grantha script, adaptation of the Tamil script being used to note Sanskrit), that nowadays only rare Indian scholars like those employed by the IFP possess; the texts selected in priority for the cataloguing and the scanning, are the shaivite agamas, i.e. the doctrinal or ritual texts of Shaivasiddhanta tradition, which are the most original in the IFP collection.

Parallel to this work of long-term cataloguing, the department of Indology publishes, presents and translates some of the most important shaivite texts of its collection: this activity of study and publication of the agamas, which has established the celebrity of the Institute in the world of indology for fifty years, by making available hitherto unpublished fundamental shaivite texts, goes on today with several critical editions in progress (Diptagama, in collaboration with University Paris-III, Pancavaranastava,…). Descriptive cataloguing and editing of texts are the sources which will enable to reconstruct the history of shaivism in Tamil Nadu.

The other important collection of IFP, the photo library, is also in the process of archiving and analysis. As the previous one, this programme presents two aspects: one, in the long term, of archiving and preserving the collection by scanning negatives and electronically storing the captions of the negatives, the other, in two years, of exploration and analysis of a specific subject, Pallava Kancipuram. Kancipuram is one of the major archaeological and architectural sites of the great Pallava dynasty, which reigned over Tamil Nadu between the VIIth and IXth centuries, and the photographic library of IFP houses a significant number of negatives about this site, taken during various field missions; nevertheless it seems that the identifications of the temples and statues mentioned are often erroneous or insufficient. The renewed study of the architecture, of the iconography and of the epigraphic corpus of the Pallava temples of Kancipuram, led by a team of members of EFEO and of the universities of Paris-III, Aix-en-Provence and Louvain, would make it possible to satisfactorily re-classify the part of the photo library relating to Kancipuram. This project, which uses the resources of the photo library while contributing to improve it, could provide a model for a better use and future development of the photographic collection of IFP.

Two other projects appearing in this research orientation, in keeping with the importance devoted to Agamic and Puranic texts, are doctoral studies undertaken by students from Paris-III University. The first one deals with the South-Indian adaptations of the paradoxical character of Parashurama, an incarnation of god Vishnu and a devotee of Shiva. The study aims at specifying how a character belonging to the great panindian Sanskrit tradition is perceived, and modified, in specifically chosen contexts, and thus constitutes a contribution to the study of the relations between "great" and "little" traditions in India, an active field of research for several years. The second one is concerned with a study of doctrines and Saiva rituals in Puranic context through an analysis of the Vayaviyasamhita, a long section of the Sivapurana. By financing and helping these doctoral studies, IFP perpetuates the tradition of scientific and/or financial support, from which have benefited most of the Ph. D. Indology theses defended in France since its foundation. At last, in the frame of the history of religions research orientation of the IFP, is also underway an ambitious project entitled “Brahmin Authority in Ancient India: Creation of a Trans-regional Elite Culture”, which consists in the study of the transformations undergone by the Brahmin priesthood between the 6th century BC and the 6th century AD.

3/ Tamil Studies

Due to the favorable geographical location of IFP in the heart of the Tamil country, the department of Indology cannot but study Tamil culture in its multiple forms. The Felicitation Volume which was be published recently by IFP at the occasion of the seventieth birthday of the distinguished French Tamilist François Gros, bringing together around forty contributions of the most important contemporary Tamilists, rightly illustrated the diversity of the Tamil culture and literature; this editorial project must also be seen as a testimony of IFP’s will to re-launch its publications in the field of classical Tamil, particularly through the completion (in the form of a book or a CD-ROM, as for Tevaram) of several editions and translations of texts, undertaken a few years ago by pandits of IFP.

Since only a broad historical perspective enables to understand in-depth Tamil culture, IFP has taken up work on a historical atlas of South India from the origins to the XVIth century, carried out in collaboration with several Indian institutions, primarily Tamil University of Thanjavur; it deals with developing a Geographical Information System to chart and visualize various archaeological, epigraphic or architectural data, relating to the historical Tamil country (corresponding to the current States of Tamil Nadu and Kerala), presented on a multi-media product. This project, original in the world of Indian universities, where historical geography is rather less developed, should help to better position, and perhaps solve, some of the historiographical problems which have occupied historians of South India for about thirty years (segmentary or feudal state, role of commercial networks,…). This ambitious project has recently received a new impetus through the generous grant allotted by the Ford Foundation, which is a clear testimony of the attention it draws.

Another direction of research within the "Tamil Studies" programme relates to contemporary Tamil Nadu. The interest taken in contemporary Tamil Nadu attests the broad conception of indology defended at IFP, which does not want to restrict itself to the studies of Sanskrit philology. As Tamil possesses, besides Sanskrit, the oldest and most prestigious literature of India, to study its contemporary forms and transformations also provides a particularly instructive example of the way in which an old traditional culture enters in conflict or agreement with modernity (Tamil, for example, is a very present language on the Internet by the number of sites).

The first project relates to contemporary Tamil literature with a triple effort of documentation, analysis and translation: IFP has constituted over a few years an exceptional collection of rare Tamil literary journals of the XXth century, published in Tamil Nadu or by members of the large Tamil diaspora, which allows to draw up a history of the literary Tamil culture and of its relationship to popular literature. Concurrently with this effort of acquisition and socio-cultural analysis (in particular reading practices) of books and journals, this project also aims at making known outside the vigour of contemporary Tamil literature through translations in French of selected texts.

The second project bearing upon contemporary Tamil Nadu is a quasi completed doctoral study undertaken by a Tamil student on the social history of the teaching of mathematics in colonial Tamil Nadu (1820-1940), which could be prolonged and enriched by a social history of sciences in colonial Tamil Nadu. The history and the philosophy of sciences are very recent disciplines in the Indian universities and the history of "colonial science" has concentrated up to now on the institutional aspects, considering colonial society as a passive receptacle of an European science imposed from outside; the re-establishment of a more complex reality requires to take into account the sources in Tamil language and to know the various scientific traditions which were in course in Tamil Nadu before and during colonization. As for the previous project, it is important to emphasize that the modes of approach developed are original in the Indian, specifically Tamil, intellectual and scholarly context, and can thus provide IFP with a driving role in these questionings for collaborations with Tamil institutions.

On the whole, the department of Indology of the French Institute of Pondicherry endeavours to make the best use of its noteworthy documentary resources, of the presence of Indian scholars attached to the institution and of its location in South India, in the Tamil country. Associating the will to understand from inside Indian conceptions of the subjects under study with the use of Western university methods, it develops with determination a policy of preserving and transmitting, to the outside world and contemporary India, the very rich Indian cultural heritage.