THE library at the French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP) has nearly 60,000 books, journals and manuscripts devoted to Indology, ecology and sociology. In this library, members of the research programme on Contemporary Tamil Culture have assiduously built for their programme a treasure house of about 7,000 books. This valuable collection is largely due to the passion that Dr. Francois Gros and M. Kannan have for studying contemporary Tamil, including Dalit literature.
These 7,000 books include novels, collections of short stories, poems, literary criticism, essays, works on folklore and magazines. "It is a rigorous collection. We do not collect everything. The collection reflects a cultural cross section of contemporary Tamil language," said Kannan, who is a researcher in the Contemporary Tamil Studies section of the Indology Department of the IFP. Gros, who is now Professor of South Indian History and Philology, L'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, France, said the library made "the department a research and a resource centre for contemporary Tamil studies".
The library has a number of journals of limited circulation. These magazines may be literary or have socio-political content and command a circulation of just 500 to 1,000 copies. "But very active literature emerges from these journals," Kannan pointed out. "What we are doing in the IFP is to collect these small journals that are not collected elsewhere," he said. The journals include Manikkodi, Ezhuthu, Ka sa da tha pa ra, Zha and others.
He pointed out that the library obtained not only journals that were no longer published but also current literary journals. Pamphlets and books published in villages in Tamil Nadu were collected. Members of the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora publish many Tamil journals in Canada, Norway, France, the United Kingdom and other countries. The library has an excellent collection of contemporary Sri Lankan Tamil literature and Dalit literature in Tamil and Dalit literature in other languages translated into Tamil.
"The collection of short stories, poems, novels and journals help us keep an ear to the ground of what is happening in contemporary Tamil literature," he said. Since the IFP is "an open, neutral place", students from the Tamil University, Thanjavur, and from the United States and other countries are able to use the library without restrictions being placed on them.
The IFP, through its editorial assistance programme, is collaborating with the publishers of Vidiyal (the Dawn) from Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, in bringing out Tamil translations of the essays of Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard and those of French philosophers and the works of Latin American writers. Some of the books published by the IFP are bilingual - they are in English and Tamil.
Researchers in the Contemporary Tamil Studies section keep track of cultural trends in Tamil literature and are carrying out studies of Tamil dialects and the links between classical and contemporary Tamil. "This is a continuation of the holistic approach we are trying to develop in the study of Tamil literature," Gros said. As part of the research programme, international conferences and seminars are conducted regularly, the most recent one being on Tamil dialects.
T.S. SubramanianCOMMents
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