Socially elevating literatures transcend generations: Kanimozhi

Literary works that bring in social transformation alone will transcend generations and remain popular, Rajya Sabha MP, Kanimozhi said on Sunday. She was speaking at an academic session on “Padaippilakkiya Nokkum, Pokkum,” on the concluding day of the World Classical Tamil Conference presided by Prof. Karthigesu. Sivathambi.

Ms. Kanimozhi said that there had been a debate on whether the literature has a direction and objective. Literature should be in a conversation mode and expressive in nature with a beautiful richness. Literary creations could never be for one's own self. In today's world, sharing has become more important and essential. Happiness or sorrow should not be suppressed in one's own self then it would not reap any benefits. Sharing such emotions, through literature will bring immense benefits. Be it song, drama, kavithai or film, they are called as “Padaippilakkiyam.”

When literary works are on the basis of sharing, they stand popular transcending generations. Literary works that fail to usher in the required social transformation are of no use and it is as good as presuming that such works never existed, she said. In a world racing against time, many incidents, events that are witnessed are often forgotten. No body thinks or looks into the reasons for such incidents or events. When such incidents or events make a person to record the same by writing, it becomes a literary work, she added.

Observing that many people see the works born out of the Dravidian movement as propaganda, Ms. Kanimozhi said that the issue would be settled in due course. Be it ancient sangam or medieval or modern literature, humanity was in the habit of taking just what was required for them. Literature depicts women in very good light whereas the society tends to see women in a bad light or context. Tinsel world was in the habit of portraying women in a negative manner. When such creations are appreciated and encouraged, the deterioration of culture begins. When women record the sufferings and the pains that they have undergone, the society shows a very poor acceptability to such works. Women should continue to document their experiences and thoughts as literature.

Literatures of the past have contributed to social transformation thus transcending generations and time alone is the best evaluator for any form of literature.

A recollection on world Tamil meets

The idea of forming the International Association of Tamil Research (IATR) took shape when most of the Tamil scholars attended the South Asian Linguistic Conference held in New Delhi.

Ka. Po. Rathinam, former MP belonging to the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) in Sri Lanka, proposed this and was welcomed by Dr. M. Varadarajan, Fr. Thani Nayagam of the University of Malaya, Salai Elanthirayan of Delhi University and various other Tamil scholars.

The main condition of the IATR to hold a World Tamil Conference was that it should be supported by the Government of the host country and sponsored by its university. It was then possible to hold the first World Tamil Conference at Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, in 1966. Tunku Abdul Rahman was the Prime Minister at that time and Thani Nayagam of Sri Lanka was the head of the Tamil Department of University of Malaysia.

The then Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, M. Baktavatsalam, led a delegation from Chennai with Tamil scholars such as T.P. Meenakshi Sundaram, Ki. Va. Jeganathan, Sanjeevi, V.R. Nedunchezhian and Sa.Ganesan .

From Sri Lanka, TULF leader A. Amirthalingam and Rajadurai, MP from Batticaloa, and a small group participated.

Mr. Bakthavatsalam announced that Tamil Nadu would host the second IATR World Tamil Conference in Chennai. His successor C.N. Annadurai fulfilled the promise in 1968.

M. Karunanidhi, then the Public Works Minister, played an important role in making the conference a grand success. It was held with the involvement of all the people. Various functions were arranged at Island Grounds in Chennai, which was named ‘Theevu Thidal.'

“I was a student leader of Tamil Nadu and stopped the agitation for a separate State that was announced by the students of Coimbatore Agricultural College. The third Tamil Conference was held in Paris in 1970. Pilliazo was the head of the Department of Linguistic Studies in the College De France there.

The responsibility of organising the conference was undertaken by Fr. Thani Nayagam. Malcolm S. Adiseshiah donated a huge amount in his capacity as the Secretary General of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.

For the fourth Tamil Conference in Jaffna (Sri Lanka) in 1974, I entered the country without the knowledge of Sri Lankan Government although the then Prime Minister, Srimavo Bandaranaike, gave instructions to cancel all visas issued to the Tamil scholars from Tamil Nadu.

The fifth Tamil conference was held in the University of Malaya in a grand manner in 1977. V. David, MP of Malaysia, was the president of World Tamil Movement and I was the vice-president. Dato Samy Vellu, the then Minister from Malasyia, extended full support. I led a delegation of 300 people to the conference from Chennai.

Chief Minister M.G. Ramachandran came forward to conduct the next conference in Madurai in 1981 and gave a facelift to the town.

In 1989, Parasuram Arumugham, a Minister in Mauritius, took special interest in conducting the conference. Actor Kamal Hassan stole the show when thousands of Mauritius Tamils attended the conference. The public meeting was held in the sports ground of Mauritius. The irony was that although there were Tamil names they could not utter a single word in Tamil.

At least South Africans were able to say “Vanakkam”, taught by Govindaswamy, a Tamil teacher who studied in Annamalai University. In 1995, the then Chief Minister, Jayalalithaa, conducted the Tamil Conference at Thanjavur and that town got a facelift in terms of infrastructure and accommodation.

An unpleasant incident took place when the Central Bureau of Investigation stopped Dr. Sivathambi and a few Tamil scholars who came on a tourist visa to Tamil Nadu to attend the conference.

Thereafter the IATR did not evince any interest in holding World Tamil Conferences in India.

Now, Mr. Karunanidhi has put and end to IATR's hesitation, by taking the wise decision of conducting a “ Classical Tamil Conference”. It paves way to conduct a Tamil conference elsewhere including Singapore, the United Kingdom, Europe and Canada where lakhs of Tamils are living.

Ninth World Tamil Internet Conference 2010 concludes

The State Government has issued an order that it will migrate to 16-bit encoding, mainly Unicode, from eight bit encoding for all its computer applications in Tamil.

Speaking at the concluding session of the Ninth World Tamil Internet Conference (TIC) 2010 here on Sunday, Information Technology Secretary P.W.C. Davidar said theGovernment Order was issued onJune 23, 2010.

According to the order, the Government will stop using all eight-bit encoding and migrate immediately to 16-bit encoding. Unicode will be the main code to be used in all applications where support for Tamil is available.

In applications that do not support Unicode, TACE16 (Tamil All Character Encoding) will be used as the alternative standard.

Speaking at the session, Information Technology Minister Poongothai Aladi Aruna said IT was reaching new heights. It was going to all fields and was becoming multi-dimensional. It should go to the villages too through Tamil. The Government would support efforts taken for this.

“The government should not be seen. It should be felt through the e-governance initiatives,” Santhosh Babu, Managing Director of the Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu, said.

Through e-governance, it was now possible to get birth, death, and nativity certificates by applying online.

As many as 138 papers were presented at the TIC that concluded here on Sunday. Of these, 75 were presented by overseas participants, numbering about 150.

Some of the subjects covered at the conference were: e-governance, wikipedia, blogs, search engines, character recognition and Tamil domains.

For the computer professionals, some of the emerging areas of interest in Tamil computing were high-scale, high-quality content, Tamil domain name and more search engines. For the users, it was easily extractable content, according to M. Anandakrishnan, chairman of the local organising committee of the conference.

Call for Tamil cultural centres in foreign countries

Former Vice-Chancellor of Manonmaniam Sundaranar University and Chairman of the Seminar on ‘Kadal Kadantha Tamil, Tamilar' organised as part of the World Classical Tamil Conference K.P. Aravanan on Saturday appealed to the State government to seek the Centre's support for establishing Tamil cultural centres in countries with Tamil population.

Mr. Aravanan made this as a concluding remark of the seminar and pointed out that only 15 per cent of overseas Tamils seemed to lead a happy life, while 35 per cent were in average state and the remaining 50 per cent facing some problem or the other and sought measures to ensure a decent living for those people. Mr. Aravanan said that very few linguistic communities had crossed the shore and Tamil was primary among them.

The migration of linguistic communities was either for survival or for position. There are no archaeological traces for the presence of Tamil in Egypt, Greece, Rome or China. Classifying the presence of the language among the Tamilians, Mr. Aravanan named four models: Reunion, where the language no longer exists among the generations, Euro Union where the language exists only with the first generation migrants, South African-Mauritius where the language had merged with the local dialects thus becoming a new language and Singapore and Malaysia model still had Tamils transcending generations.

N. Andiappan of Writers Association from Singapore called for a World Classical Tamil secretariat branch at Singapore and suggested that for the headquarters there could be representatives from each country. He pointed out that Tamils occupied major positions in the country. P. Rajendran of the Malaysian Writers Association and a journalist said that the crisis for Tamil was over in Malaysia and the government was responding to the requirements of the Tamil people positively now. He also called for a World Classical Tamil conference branch secretariat at Malaysia for the benefit of the people living in southeast Asian countries.

Pal Pandian of the U.S sought for institution of a Chair for Tamil or a department in the universities there and suggested that as in the lines of the Union government, the State should also come forward to have a department or a ministry for Tamils living overseas.

Kerala institute willing to translate Tamil literary works

COIMBATORE: The International Institute of Dravidian Linguistics in Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala is willing to translate Tamil literary works into Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam, said Puthusseri Ramachandran, honorary professor of the Institute, here on Friday.

Speaking to TheHindu on the sidelines of the World Classical Tamil Conference (WCTC), he explained: “This is in response to Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi's call on Thursday for translating Tamil literary works into other languages.”

A poet and writer, Mr. Ramachandran has done extensive research on the evolution of the Dravidian languages. “We have the expertise and the infrastructure to carry out the translation. This will be discussed by the institute's board and a formal proposal will be sent to the Tamil Nadu government,” he said.

Translation was important to enable each linguistic section understand the language and culture of the other. As a first step, at least the States in South India, which was the cradle of the Dravidian culture, should know each other through their literary works.

“I hope to meet Mr. Karunanidhi during the ongoing conference to discuss the proposal and also compliment him on the conduct of the WCTC that is witnessing absolute devotion on the part of Tamils to their language and culture,” he said.

“The conference in Coimbatore makes me feel pained that the struggle to get classical language status for Malayalam is yet to meet with success. A delegation led by Kerala Chief Minister C. Achuthanandan had submitted a memorandum to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Experts will study the memorandum,” he said. Mr. Ramachandran was part of the delegation.

The 83-year-old researcher and critic on Dravidian languages argued that even if a language was living and evolving, the classical status would only enhance its value through various promotional efforts.

“The Central government provides Rs.100 crore as grant, with the condition that enough studies on and the promotion of the language, declared as classical, must be done.”

The funds would certainly enable the setting up of institutions and other infrastructure necessary for the development of language. From short stories to Internet, the use of a language could be enhanced.

“Take for instance journalism, which is also a medium of learning for the people. Language plays a significant role in disseminating information through various forms of media,” he pointed out.

Turning to the situation in Kerala, Mr. Ramachandran said he led the efforts in conducting the first All India Conference on Dravidian Linguistics in Thiruvananthapuram in 1971 because “we felt there was a need for Malayalam teachers to interact with their counterparts in other languages. So, we held the first World Malayalam Conference in 1977.”

He lamented that the passion and dedication the Tamils had for their language and culture was missing in Kerala. “Malayalees must learn from Tamils.”

“Even 33 years after the conference was held, Kerala still does not have a Malayalam University, in sharp contrast to the language universities of other southern States,” he pointed out.

The younger generation is not encouraged to learn Malayalam. The focus was on learning only that language which would fetch jobs overseas. This rocked the very foundation of the Malayalee culture. “I plan to bring out an English version of my book on inscriptions in Kerala's history because there were very few takers for the original seminal work in Malayalam.”

“Now, we need to first educate the politicians and the elite of Kerala on the need to develop the language. Quite a number of people should also be educated on the fact that Malayalam is 1,500 years old and that it did not emerge from Thunjath Ezhuthachan's ‘Adyathma Ramayanam',” he said.

Asked if the classical language status was becoming an instrument for political one-upmanship, Mr. Ramachandran said: “The passion for one's own language and the pursuit for a classical status should be independent of politics.

At the same time, a healthy competition among political formations for obtaining this status for their language is always welcome.”

MP on World Tamil Conference

While hailing the Tamil Classical Conference (Semmoli Maha Nadu) being held in Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, one could not ignore the absence of any Sri Lankan Tamil Parliament Members at this historic moot, said MP A.H.M. Azwer in a release yesterday.

He said, the so-called champions in Tamil Nadu who do not fail to let out their verbose unceasingly shedding crocodile tears for their brethren in Sri Lanka has exposed their hypocracy in not inviting a single Member in our Parliament for this occasion when, they claim that Tamil academics and Intellectual have from around the globe found their due place in the vast concourse of over 4,000 delegates attending this Conference.

“M. Karunanidhi, the brain behind this world Tamil Vilzha, should also be reminded that it was a Sri Lanka born Tamil, the modern architect of the International Tamil Conference, first organized in four world centres. He laid the foundation for the renaissance of Tamil language and culture, bringing together under one roof non-Tamil Tamil scholars from various corners of the world and created a new dimension in this field.”

“News reaches our shores that even the former Indian President Abdul Kalam, a great Tamil scholar has been omitted from the invitees list,” he said.

Initiative to preserve, promote Tamil culture

The work of Subashini Tremmel and her group is a good example of what happens when computer technology is used to preserve a rich language and culture.

The software engineer and 1,070 enthusiasts, mostly from the Tamil diaspora, have come together to preserve and promote Tamil language and culture. They have formed the Tamil Heritage Foundation (THF) for the purpose.

Ms. Tremmel, a Tamil of Malaysian origin working in Germany, says the group has collected around 300 books and 28,000 palm manuscripts, some of which have been uploaded on its website, www.tamilheritage.org.

The vision document on the site says: “Tamil Heritage Foundation is a global initiative to preserve and understand Tamil heritage in a proper scientific way so that its history, science and technology are properly understood.” The group has been at it for the past 10 years. “On the eve of the First Tamil Internet Conference, Narayanan Kannan, a scientist of Tamil origin working in South Korea, and I had a discussion and subsequently realised the need for having an organisation to preserve Tamil language and culture. THF is an outcome of that,” she recalls. She adds that “in Germany or any other country for that matter, it is difficult to read Tamil books or watch programmes related to Tamil or Tamil Nadu on TV. Bringing in books physically is a costly affair and even if TV programmes are available, one cannot watch what he or she wants.” The foundation is the result of that desire and need of the Tamil diaspora. And the community felt that it can leverage the power of the computer and Internet for the purpose.

Team touring State

Since 2001, Ms. Tremmel and a core group of 50 members have been touring Tamil Nadu to document almost everything under the sun that relates to Tamil. “From siddha medicinal herbs to Tamil lifestyle to music and dance to temple architecture, we document everything without sitting on judgment.”

Whatever is collected is vetted by a group of subject experts. “We want the information to be authentic,” she says. Only books without copyrights are made as e-books. To underscore the importance the THF attaches to authenticity, she says she spent days with Radha Chellappan, granddaughter of Tamil scholar Vaiyapuri Pillai, to write an authentic account of Pillai.