1. A Study and translation of Āṇṭāḷ’s works.  This is done with the greatest respect and reverence.

2. A study of the Tirumantiram.

3. A translation and study of Krishnadevaraya’s great Telugu poem the Āmuktamālyadā, showing how it is indebted to the Tamil works of the Āḻvār saints.

4. A respectful study of Puja practices in the great temples of Tamil Nadu, showing how they differ.

5. A translation of the Maturai Mīṉāṭci Piḷḷaittamiḻ, which glorifies the goddess Minakshi.

6. A study of the great medieval commentators on the Tolkāppiyam (most of whom, like Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar, were Brahmins and who used a pure Tamil without Sanskrit borrowings).

7. Reading and appreciating the greatest work of Indian literature, Kampaṉ’s Rāmāyaṇa, in class.

8. Reading and appreciating the great Sangam classics, including the great bhakti works of the Paripāṭal and the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai, classics that use 98% pure Tamil (not Sanskrit-derived) vocabulary.

Many other endeavors that attempt to appreciate, respect, and understand Hinduism and India and the role the Tamil language has played in their history.

Note that above, Mr. Jethamalani, who apparently considers himself an expert on such things, states that Tamil and the other Dravidian languages are derived from Sanskrit.  Perhaps if he learned to count to 10 in any of these languages, he would discover that they are actually separate and come from a different source than Sanskrit.

I am at a loss to understand why some feel threatened by something that makes Indian and Hindu culture richer: that Tamil, like Sanskrit, is a classical language and that its ancient literature is a source of many of the important features of Hinduism.  The Āḻvārs derived their conventions from Sangam literature and used them to glorify God (Viṣṇu)—while at the same time taking much from the great Sanskrit epics and the Vedas.  Subsequently, as the Bhāgavatam says, this bhakti worship spread from the Tamil area north and influenced such great works as Tulsi’s Manas.

To suggest that the Tamil Chair is in any way involved with “breaking India” is libelous.  Its purpose and its mission have been to bring to light the great Tamil classics, many of which are among the greatest works of Hinduism and of Indian culture. Unlike some, the Tamil program at Berkeley does not try to make itself taller by cutting off the heads of others.  Rather, it wishes to spread awareness of the great contributions made by the Tamils to world culture, to India—and to Hinduism.

George Hart, Tamil Chair, University of California, Berkeley

In the first millennkum CE, Sanskrit was what Pollock has called a “cosmopolitan language.”  By that he means that it was used as a sign and carrier of political and cultural status.  But it was much more than that. In an area with hundreds of different languages, ranging from Kashmir to Indonesia and Cambodia, it was used as a language of communication.  Buddhists used it just as much as Hindus, and one cannot study Buddhism properly without knowing Sanskrit. The breadth of subjects addressed in Sanskrit is enormous, including literature, literary theory, Buddhist philosophy, logic, eroticism, music, dance, medicine, astrology, mathematics, the Vedas — the list goes on and on.  One can find documents advocating Brahmin supremacy, but there are also many sources in Sanskrit that mock Brahmanism. So much has been written in Sanskrit that it is virtually impossible for any one person to become an expert in all its different forms.  It is an ocean that goes on and on and seemingly spreads everywhere. Even among Hindus, Sanskrit writers were not exclusively Brahmin. The people who sang the epics, Sūtas and Magadhas, were not Brahmins, and the Sanskrit plays show many non-Brahmins proficient in Sanskrit.

If there is anything lamentable about this it is that the enormous respect and weight given to Sanskrit tended to strangle other languages.  We have little or nothing in Telugu or Kannada until about the 10th century, even though we know those languages were widely spoken and vigorous.  And when Telugu and Kannada do develop literatures, they borrow their conventions and literary ideas almost entirely from Sanskrit — with few exceptions (like the Vacanas in Kannada), we do not see local oral literature reflected in the major works of these languages.   They gained status by imitating Sanskrit, and one major Telugu poet actually had to write a Sanskrit version of a work he had already written so that he could claim his own work as an anuvāda of a Sanskrit original.

What about Tamil?  It had the good fortune to gain an extensive written literature before the Sanskrit juggernaut became irresistible.  Its early works owe virtually nothing to Sanskrit, but rather are indebted to the oral traditions of the local countryside.  Perhaps this process was helped along by the vast distances between the Tamil areas and North India.  In any event, we are fortunate that Sangam literature was valued and preserved, as it is not only one of the great world literatures, it gives us a lens through which we can see ancient Tamil culture without the distortion of Sanskrit sources, which tend to adhere to a set of conventions and ideas that are independent of any given area or culture.  Whether written by Buddhists or Hindus, Sanskrit invariably adopts a sort of elitist perspective, out of touch with local developments.  Tamil is quite different.  As anyone reading Sangam literature knows, its works are quite thoroughly grounded in local traditions and describe people of all backgrounds and classes.  Because Tamil developed its own identity so early, it remained relatively immune to the influence of Sanskrit.  It retained (and retains) its own writing system that genuinely fits the pronunciation of the language unlike, say, Malayalam, most of whose speakers write bhū but say pū.

There is another way to envision Sanskrit, and that is as an enormous pool collecting any significant cultural or technical knowledge from every part of South Asia.  It is scarcely the pristine  and untouched artifact of elitism that many imagine.  There is a huge Buddhist literature in corrupt Sanskrit, and in Malayalam we find true maṇipravāḷam, which combines Sanskrit and Malayalam-Tamil grammar in striking and unexpected ways.  Most modern South Asian languages exist as continua between Sanskrit and spoken language.  This is especially true of Hindi, which uses Sanskrit neologisms that are absent in the commonly spoken language.

The early origins of Tamil and of its writing system have helped it keep its separate identity from Sanskrit.  Most Sanskrit words cannot even be written accurately in Tamil — ṛṣabha becomes iṭupam, for example.  From the beginning, elegant Tamil has eschewed Sanskrit words and encouraged the use of pure Tamil vocabulary, though of course Tamil has still managed to borrow an enormous number of Sanskrit words (just as Sanskrit has borrowed many Dravidian words).  Once, reading a hymn from the Rig Veda, we found that virtually every word is found in modern Tamil.  The fact is that everyday Tamil uses much more Sanskrit than Hindi (pustakam vs. kibāb).  But while the use of Sanskrit creates a high diction or tone in Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali, and other languages, it does not do so for Tamil.  Rather, Sanskrit words give a colloquial, everyday flavor to Tamil (sneehitaṉ, cuttam, sattam, varṣam).  For formal Tamil, one must use words like naṇpaṉ, tūymai, oli, āṇṭu, and these pure Dravidian words impart an elegance that is entirely lacking when Sanskrit words are used.  Is the use of Sanskrit vocabulary therefore to be avoided in Tamil?  I would rather argue that Sanskrit, like English, is a source of richness for Tamil, enabling different registers of the language that coexist with the elegant register of pure Tamil.  Ultimately, the identity of Tamil has, from the first, been mainly dependent on its elegant incarnation.  Centamiḻ is the heart and soul of the language, but Sanskrit and English are attributes that can be used to enrich it.

I don’t think Tamil is threatened by Sanskrit (or even English), and I don’t think it ever has been.  Its separate identity and character have been cultivated and preserved from its beginnings to the present, and they will be preserved.  The Tamils value and love their language, and they will certainly always continue to cultivate it.  I find myself less sanguine about Sanskrit itself.  Nowadays, very few serious scholars in India study Sanskrit.  The language, however many Hindi or Malayalam words it may furnish, is dying of neglect, and as a result much of the cultural history of South and Southeast Asia is becoming inaccessible.  I find it ironic that some Tamilians still feel their language threatened by Sanskrit, while in fact Tamil is flourishing and it is Sanskrit that is threatened by neglect.  Tamil and Sanskrit are, after all, the two classical languages of India (and South Asia) and, if we are to properly understand the heritage of India, both must be cultivated and studied.

– George Hart

It would, in my view, be a serious mistake to include Sanskrit sounds (except for those in general use, like ஜ்) in Tamil unicode.  At the same time, it should be possible to write Tamil manipravalam.  The solution seems simple.  The Unicode consortium is working on the implementation of Grantha.  When we have that, someone can write an editor that allows easy switching between unicode Tamil and Grantha.  The editor might have text entered in Roman and then converted; for example, abhayam would give all Tamil characters, but would use the Grantha character for bh.  Another option is that many operating systems make it easy to switch from one unicode language to another (it is command-space on my Mac), and this would also make it simple to use Grantha glyphs for Sanskrit sounds.

In the end, I think it is important to preserve Grantha and not let it be entirely supplanted by Devanagari.  In more recent times, many books have appeared that use Devanagari for Sanskrit and Tamil for Tamil — producing a result that is readable but rather ugly.  It would be especially unfortunate if Devanagari came to be used in the middle of Tamil words.  Using Grantha for such purposes is both desirable and necessary, as the combination of Grantha and Tamil has a long history (including many inscriptions).

Keeping Grantha and Tamil separate, with separate Unicode blocks, should satisfy everyone.  If one looks through Sangam literature or Kampan, there is not a Grantha letter to be found.  In modern Tamil books, the only Grantha letters are those few that are needed for foreign words.  There is absolutely no need to expand the Tamil unicode slots to include the unused Grantha letters.  The inclusion of Sanskrit sounds in Tamil, where necessary, can easily be accomplished by combining Tamil and Grantha, leaving Tamil as it is at present.

In late 1983, after the Lisa was introduced, Mark Cutter, who wrote LaserDraw and subsequently MacDraw and who was interested in TM and India, wanted to implement Sanskrit (Devanagari) on the Lisa.  He had Apple supply me with a Lisa and later, when it appeared, a Mac, for this purpose.  The procedure for developing a font was clumsy, to put it mildly.  One had to boot up in UCSD Pascal and run a Pascal program that allowed one to draw each character.  Then it had to be saved and implemented by some procedure that I have mercifully forgotten.  When the Mac appeared, it had to be transferred to the Mac by serial cable.  The drives for the Lisa were 5-megabyte wonders, connected also by serial cable and necessarily tortuously slow.  I fixed up Mark’s implementation of Devanagari and made an implementation of Tamil based on a typewriter we had purchased in India (using the same key positions).  Unlike Windows, the Lisa/Mac OS allowed kerning, so we could use only one slot for the puḷḷi.

Subsequently, in 1985, the Laserwriter appeared.  I have a letter I wrote on Oct. 27, 1985.  Here’s how it begins:

“This is to let interested parties know of the progress I have made in developing a Tamil font for the LaserWriter, and of some of the things I have discovered while implementing the font (things that will be of use in developing other fonts, such as Devanagari).

As the enclosed LaserWriter printout shows, I have completed the first version of the Tamil font, which I have already begun to use heavily for teaching (much to the delight of my students, who do not much like my  Tamil handwriting).  Several remarks.  First, the font came out much better than I could have hoped.  It is easily legible, and has a professional look about it—in spite of the fact that I am, artistically, quite hopeless.  In fact, it looks better than most printed fonts for Tamil books (I am enclosing a xerox of the source for comparison).  Let me list the things that need to be remarked on.”

As of October, 2010, we still use the Tamil fonts we implemented in the 80′s, though we now have tools to convert them to Unicode.  We have a huge library of various texts (quizzes, articles, stories and the like) for learning Tamil.  The text written by Kausalya Hart for first-year Tamil, Tamil for Beginners, uses the fonts we developed.

George Hart