Tamil Chair at
University of California, Berkeley (UCB): An Update.
History:
A language is more than just
a means of communication. It is a repository of a community’s collective
history and heritage. It also provides an identity and a focus that binds
together a community for social togetherness, that makes individual accomplishments
that much more easier. Well aware of this, Tamils of North America, made a
commitment to themselves to perpetuate the learning of Tamil in the Americas.
Towards that primary goal, the UCB Tamil Chair was conceived in 1991, and
a formal committee was formed in 1992 to provide focus to the fund raising
efforts and to manage the logistics with UCB.
The Tamil community needed
$400K to establish this Tamil Chair. From a Mathematical perspective, it looked
easy. To get $1000 each from 400 families who are reasonably affluent did
not look like a daunting task. The realities proved otherwise. The Indian
psyche may have been conditioned to give generously to Religious institutions,
but the appeal of an endowment for a prestigious learning center proved too
narrow.
It took almost three years
to collect the necessary funds. The rewarding part was that it was truly a
grass root effort with no involvement from any special interest groups or
partisan governments. Two of the biggest donors
were Mrs. & Mr. Thukkaram
and Dr. & Mr. Jamunah and Aru Arasu. There
were five other donors who had given more than $10,000 each. The rest was
from about 470 other donors whose contributions ranged from $5 to $9,999.
The Grand total collected by mid-1995 was close to $425K. It took almost a
year for the “Board of Regents” at UCB to formally approve the
Tamil Chair and Dr.George Hart was appointed “Chair” by mid-1996,
and “Tamil Chair” was formally inaugurated to the excitement of
the Tamil community by November 1996.
The first of it’s kind, a “Tamil Chair” in an American
University, had been established.
Activities:
The first year saw a Tamil
conference at UCB, with many who are involved with Tamil teaching in western
world, being present. Besides Dr.George Hart, who is now familiar to most
of the Tamil Community in North America, Dr. Thomas Malten (Germany), Professor
Schiffman and Professor Vasu Ranganathan (Pennsylvania) and Dr.Norman Cutler
(Chicago) were some of the educators who were present. This was one of the earliest conferences that recognized the
need for standardization of Tamil
Fonts, and sowed the seeds for further discussions of Tamil Font encoding schemes.
The Tamil Chair also participated
in funding partly the digitization project of Tamil Sangam and other Tamil literary works, spear headed by
Dr.Thomas Malten. The next year,
1998, saw the visit of Professor
Ilakkuvanar Maraimalai from Chennai to UCB. Professor Maraimalai, besides contributing to the Tamil academic
programs of UCB, also helped awaken the Tamil literary awareness of the Tamil
Community in the San Francisco Bay Area with his BI-weekly fireside chats
on Tamil literature. The following years saw author Dilip Kumar, and then
Professor Muthu Chidambaram from Tamil Nadu taking up assignments at UCB under
the Tamil Chair program.
All this while, Tamil courses
were being offered at UCB and a program that was marginal had been made much
more central after the establishment of the Tamil chair. There is anywhere
upto 30 students a year who take up Tamil language courses, with many of them
being second generation Tamil Americans.
Future:
The Tamil language program is going well and currently
has 12 first year students, 6 second year students and 6 third year students.
Besides this, an emphasize has been placed for majority of money generated
by Tamil Chair to go to supporting Tamil graduate PhD students. It will allow
students to study Tamil who otherwise might not be able to. The ‘Chair’
Dr.George Hart says, “It is my opinion that the best use for the money
is as seed money -- that is, if we can produce a Tamil student who gets a
tenured job at a major university teaching Tamil, then we get a fantastic
return on our investment, since that student then generates more students,
and Tamil becomes better and better established. This, in fact, is happening. . At the
moment, I have four graduate students. Last year I had five”.
Dr.George Hart mentions that
the most advanced students, Layne Little and Archana Venkatesan, have produced
wonderful translations and papers that are of publishable quality.
The Tamil community should
now look at other learning institutions to promote programs similar to or
better than the one at UCB. This needs local champions in the respective metropolitan
areas where the learning institutions are located. Academicians to man these
programs are being readied by the UCB Tamil Chair program. Dr.George Hart, who believes the foundation
has been set up, had this to say, “I think we can all be proud of what has been accomplished.
A significant and important step has been made toward making more in academia
aware of Tamil and its rich heritage and in producing students who can advance
the cause of Tamil in the future.”
--Kumar Kumarappan