Pondicherry
India
FRANCAIS | ENGLISH


Responsable: Dominic Goodall

École française d'Extrême-Orient
16-19 rue Dumas
605 001 Pondicherry, India

Tel: +91 413 233 45 39
Fax: +91 413 233 08 86 goodalldominic@gmail.com
administration@efeo-pondicherry.org


PRESENTATION
LIBRARY
S. Gowri Sankaran, R. Sathyanarayanan, Thirukumaran
S. Gowri Sankaran, R. Sathyanarayanan, Thirukumaran
Murugappa Foundation Scholarships
12 JUNE 17
The French Institute of Pondicherry (IFP) and the Pondicherry Centre of the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) have been engaged in studies of the Śaiva Āgamas for some fifty years and have amassed a collection of more than 10 000 related manuscripts that was recognized by UNESCO in 2005 as a “Memory of the World” collection. Over the same period, they have been steadily publishing editions and translations of texts that for the last ten centuries (or longer) were transmitted only through hand-written copies. No further copying by hand of this literature is now taking place, but we have now fully digitized all the manuscripts with a view to putting them all online. But it is not enough simply to preserve digital images of this literature composed over more than a thousand years: it is essential also to train the next generations in reading it. This is not a straightforward activity. Many old texts survive transmitted in several hand- written copies, each of which will contain many differences due to damage, copying mistakes, muddled leaves or deliberate modification. Considerable training is required to work with materials, which may be in a variety of scripts (Newari, Grantha, Telugu, Licchavi, Sharada, etc.).

The Kāraṇāgama, is a voluminous text belonging to the āgamic corpus of which the IFP possesses many manuscripts in its collection. A project to provide a Critical Edition of the Kāraṇāgama has recently been started in which some of the researchers from both IFP and EFEO are participating. Two young scholars graduated in Saiva Agama studies are also part of this team, namely Thirukumaran (hosted by the IFP) and S. Gowri Sankaran (hosted by the EFEO). For three years a monthly scholarship for each of them is generously funded by the Murugappa Foundation, Chennai. They are being trained in the skills required for producing critical editions, such as entering a base-text into the computer, careful comparison and recording of different readings from the various manuscripts, reconstruction of the original text from among the recorded readings, etc.

 scholarships