Hymnes Tamouls à Shiva

Objectives

The multi-media "Digital Tevaram" project was initiated in July 1997 with the following objective : complete a long-pending translation project on Tevaram (a collection of ca. 800 Tamil saiva hymns by 3 authors dating back to the 7th and 8th centuries) begun in Pondicherry in the 1970s and resulting in ca. 3500 pages of unpublished translation into English by the late V.M. Subrahmanya Ayyar, an employee of IFP at the time.

Materials and Methods

Technically speaking, translation and distribution of the Tevaram text on CD-ROM is a manner of escaping the difficult choice that faces print editions : proposing hymns ordered ``according to musical modes’’ (as in the panmurai editions) or geographically ordered ``according to the sacred sites’’ (as in the talamurai editions)

In addition to overcoming the issue of textual duality, the multi-media capacities of the CD-ROM and the modern linking facilities available have enabled the project to go beyond being a mere electronic typescript. On the geographical [talamurai] side, more than one hundred digital maps, indicating the location of all the patal perra stalam (``places sung [[in the Tevaram]’’) have first been created by the IFP Geomatics Lab and subsequently electronically linked with the appropriate hymns by clickable hyperlinks. On the musical [panmurai] side, more than one hundred audio recordings (totaling more than 6 hours, in MP3 format) by various interpreters, illustrating more than 20 different pan-s (or musical modes) are also hyper-linked to the relevant hymns and presented on CD-ROM.

The CD-ROM can also be used as a linguistic tool for studying the language of Tevaram because it contains a full concordance (totaling 200,000 lines) for the 45,000 different strings that are to be met with inside the Tevaram text. This concordance is fully hyper-linked with V.M. Subrahmanya Ayyar’s translation. It is thus easy to check the interpretation accorded to any given lexical item by this illustrious scholar.

Partners

EFEO

Funding

  French Institute of Pondicherry
  Ecole Française d’Extrême Orient (EFEO)
  Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France

Team

V.M. Subrahmanya Ayyar [IFP] (late author)
[deceased in 1981]

CNRS

• Dr. Jean-Luc Chevillard, CNRS, UMR7597, editor

IFP

• Dr. Frédéric Borne, Head, LIAG
• K. Iswarialakshmi, Research Assistant
• G. Jayapalan, Research Assistant
• G.Muthusankar, Research Assistant
• R.Sivarajan, Research Assistant
• Ratnadeep Datta, Research Assistant
• Filidauro Lemaire, Research Assistant
• Ramya, Typist
• Vaidehi, Typist

EFEO

• Dr. S.A.S. Sarma, co-editor
• L. Dorairadj (Late)
• Dr. Chalotte SCHMID, Researcher
• N. Ramaswamay
• S. Manet, typing job
• G. Ravindran, photographer

Outputs

• Digital Tevaram. Kaninit Tevaram

V.M. Subramanya Aiyar, Jean-Luc Chevillard, S.A.S. Sarma. Collection Indologie n° 103, IFP-EFEO, 2007 [CD-ROM]
Language : Tamil, English. (EFEO ISBN : 2-85539-663-8)

The “Digital Tevaram” is a multi-feature CD-ROM edition of a collection of 800 Tamil hymns to Siva, possibly dating back to the 7th and 8th centuries, attributed to three authors (Sambandar, Appar and Sundarar), traditionally called Tevaram, and constituting the initial part of the Tamil Saiva Scriptures. This electronic edition of the Tamil text, furnished with many maps, MP3 audio files and a complete English rendering by the late V.M. Subrahmanya Ayyar (1906-1981), combines the features of the two traditional book-forms of Tevaram : 1. arrangement according to musical modes (pan-s), as in panmurai editions of Tevaram, and 2. arrangement according to sites (stalam-s), as in talamurai editions. It incorporates a concordance, and can be used as a dictionary of Tevaram.

Keywords : Tevaram, Saivism, Hymns to Siva, talamurai (hymns classified according to sites), panmurai (hymns classified according to musical modes)

• South Indian horizons - Felicitation volume for François Gros on the occasion of his 70th birthday

Edited by Jean-Luc Chevillard (editor) and Eva Wilden (associate editor) with the collaboration of A. Murugaiyan, IFP/EFEO, 2004, xlv, 651 p. (PDI n°94)
Langue : français, anglais, tamil. 1000 Rs (36 €)

Ce volume, hommage à François Gros et célébration du champ des études tamoules, montre la nature internationale de ce domaine et sa largeur. Les participants proviennent de 16 pays. Les disciplines concernées sont : histoire et critique littéraire, philologie, linguistique, anthropologie culturelle, histoire politique et sociale, archéologie, épigraphie, numismatique, histoire de l’art et de l’architecture. Certaines des contributions sont à cheval entre elles, et certaines concernant des langues voisines : Irula, Kannada, Malayalam et Telugu, tandis qu’une “connexité dans la diversité” fait l’unité du volume.

François Gros a été le principal représentant des études tamoules en France. Il s’est également consacré, comme directeur, à la reinstallation de l’ École Française d’Extrême-Orient dans les pays d’Asie du Sud-Est. Il a aussi été responsable scientifique de la section de tamoul à l’Institut Français de Pondichéry.

Mots-clefs : littérature tamoule, langue tamoule, langues dravidiennes, Inde du Sud