The first Caṅkam workshop took place in the EFEO centre of Pondicherry between the 29th August and 9th September. Since 2003, the EFEO has been conducting a project of locating, collecting and digitising the surviving manuscripts, on palm-leaf and paper, of the earliest Classical Tamil literature, the Caṅkam corpus, with the aim of producing critical editions with annotated translations. So far, two anthologies have been published, the Naṟṟiṇai and the Kuṟuntokai, while six further texts are under preparation, namely the Aiṅkuṟunūṟu, the Akanāṉūṟu, the Kalittokai and the Puṟanāṉūṟu, as well as the Mullaippāṭṭu and the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai from among the Pattupāṭṭu.
The workshop brought together, for the first time, all the editors working on the various texts in order to discuss issues of textual criticism on the basis of selected manuscript material. Apart from intensive reading groups for the single texts, discussions of general problems were held, such as transmissional history, the evaluation of sources, the status of commentaries, the testimony from quotations, as well as possible strategies in arriving at a Caṅkam dictionary and grammar.
The texts presented by their respective editors were:
Aiṅkuṟunūṟu by Thomas Lehmann, SAI Heidelberg
Akanāṉūṟu by Eva Wilden, EFEO Pondicherry/Hamburg University
Kalittokai by T. Rajeswari, EFEO Pondicherry
Puṟanāṉūṟu by G. Vijayavenugopal, EFEO Pondicherry
Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai by Emmanuel Francis, University of Hamburg
A presentation on the new digital resources and the collections of the EFEO has been given by  Jean-Luc Chevillard, CNRS Paris.


 workshops