V. Venkataraja Sarma
It is with deep
regret that we learned today of the demise of Professor V. Venkataraja Sarma,
quondam principal of Tiruvananthapuram Sanskrit College, who after his
retirement worked for 29 years as a senior Sanskrit scholar at the Pondicherry
Centre of the École française d’Extrême-Orient, finally leaving the institution
in December 2016 at the age of 86. On
Wednesday, 14 July 2021, at the age of 91, he passed away in Trivandrum, where
his son lives.
In the field of Sanskrit
grammar, V. Venkataraja Sarma worked for many years in collaboration with
François Grimal and with scholars of the IFP and the EFEO on the Dictionary
of Examples of Paninian Grammar, or Pāṇinīyodāharaṇakośa, a
collaborative multivolume venture of encyclopaedic proportions that presents
the examples used to illustrate the rules of the grammatical treatise of Pāṇini
(fl. 5th century BCE), the cornerstone of the vast edifice of Indian
reflections about language. V. Venkataraja Sarma was also a principal member of
the ANR project “Panini and Paninians of the 16th and 17th centuries”. During
his many years in Pondicherry, he taught and helped many researchers there.
His erudition and
his approachability meant that he was widely known as an authority on the
Sanskrit grammatical tradition (vyākaraṇa), and he received several
awards, notably the President’s award for Sanskrit in 2005. He was
awarded the Vacaspathi Puraskar by the Kadavallur Anyonyam Prasath (an
organisation which conducts every year a famous competition of Vedic recitation
in Kerala) on 19 November 2013, and the Sree Sankaracharya University of
Sanskrit, Kalady conferred upon him the distinction of a D. Litt. degree at a
special convocation ceremony in December of the same year.
The entire staff of
the Pondicherry Centre of the EFEO will always remember him with the greatest respect
and we express our deepest condolences to his family.
