Bérénice Bellina (CNRS - UMR 8068 - TEMPS, Paris/Nanterre), Aude Favereau (Institute of Archaeology, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan), Coline Lefrancq (CNRS - UMR 7041 - ARSCAN - Paris/Nanterre) and Yohan Chabot (GéoArchÉon (geoarchaeology and palaeoenvironment)) will be visiting the Pondicherry Centre during their study visit to India in January, funded by the Dharma project. Together with Valérie Gillet (EFEO, Paris), they will be visiting the Madurai and Pudukkottai regions from 15 to 22 January, to work on a joint project. The general theme of this project revolves around the question of trade and urban development over a period ranging from the first millennium BC to the thirteenth century AD, from a multidisciplinary perspective (history, epigraphy, archaeology, geoarchaeology, palaeoenvironment, geomatics, anthropology, etc.). As part of the DiPiKA project - "Digitisation and Preservation of Kerala's Archives" - funded by the Arcadia Philanthropic Foundation ("Arcadia") (Grant 2203-4800), Dominic Goodall, S.A.S. Sarma and Prerana Patel will visit the Vadake Brahmaswam Madham in Trissur to help launch this new project, which aims to preserve Kerala's rich and endangered cultural heritage by surveying and digitising palm-leaf manuscripts held in private collections across the state. The programme aims to create an online archive of Kerala's manuscripts, fully open access, to facilitate its use by researchers and private owners, thus also promoting local initiatives for the safeguarding of written historical artefacts. Hugo David (EFEO, Paris), one of the principal investigators of the DiPiKA project, will also be visiting Trissur for this event, where he will be presenting research aimed at identifying important unpublished Sanskrit texts in private manuscript collections in central Kerala with the help of local researchers, particularly in the field of Vedic studies and traditional grammar and linguistics. Marzenna Czerniak-Drożdżowicz of Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, will be visiting the EFEO's Pondicherry Center for a month to continue her project "Temples of South India: Nodal points in networks of connections" [SITes] - German-Polish grant "Beethoven Classic IV" (from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Polish National Centre for Scientific Research: DEC-2020/39/G/HS2/03593). The project focuses on the connections and flows of ideas and material objects between sacred Hindu sites, conceived here as nodes in a network mapped by stories sung, written, interpreted and even 'walked' by pilgrims. Czerniak-Drożdżowicz, in cooperation with R. Sathyanarayanan (EFEO), plans to examine the history of the peregrinations of the processional image of Śrīrangam, which would have been moved from temple to temple in Tirumalai before returning to Śrīraṅgam. |