Tamil Saiva Hymns

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authors dating back to the 7th and 8th centuries) begun in Pondicherry in the 1970s and resulting in ca. 3500 pages of unpublished translation into English by the late V.M. Subrahmanya Ayyar, an employee of IFP at the time.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)
Language: French, English, Tamil. 1000 Rs (36 €)

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, archaeologists, epigraphists, numismatists, art and architecture historians, some of them assuming two of these guises, and some having an interest in related languages: Irula, Kannada, Malayalam and Telugu. However there is much linkage and this “connexité dans la diversité” binds the different contributions together.

François Gros has been the principal standard-bearer for Tamil studies in France. He has also devoted himself to the re-establishment of the École Française d’Extrême-Orient in countries of Southeast Asia. Among his other responsibilities has been the directorship for Tamil studies at the Institut Français in Pondicherry.

Keywords: Tamil literature, Tamil language, Dravidian languages, South India