Saravanan Sundaramoorthy

Saravanan Sundaramoorthy has been a researcher at the Pondicherry Center of the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) since 2018. His research focuses primarily on Tamil linguistics, classical Tamil literature, and the study of Tamil grammatical and manuscript traditions.

In particular, he has worked on the study and publication of grammatical and literary texts from the Tamil scholarly tradition. As part of the NETamil project, he contributed to the work of the group focused on the Tolkāppiyam and studied the composite manuscript MSSML 631, for which he arranged the folios and produced a transcription, accompanied by a study of its content.

His research has also expanded to include a study of the dissemination of the Śivadharma corpus in the Tamil-speaking world and the collaborative preparation of an English translation of selected chapters from the Tamil Śivadharmottara.

He has also worked on the Kāñcippurāṇam, focusing in particular on transcription, the collation of manuscript sources, and the preparation of a preliminary translation as part of the Hindu Temple Legends in South India project.

Since 2023, he has been participating in the TAMILEX project, which is dedicated to building an electronic corpus of classical Tamil literature and compiling a historical lexicon of classical Tamil. As part of this project, he has prepared lemmatized glossaries for the Nālaṭiyār and the Tolkāppiyam, and is currently working on the development of a lemmatized glossary of the Naṉṉūl.

• 2004 – Bachelor’s degree in Tamil, Poompuhar College
• 2006 – Master’s degree in Tamil, A.V.C. College
• 2007 – M.Phil. in Linguistics, Tamil University, Thanjavur
• 2010 – Master’s degree in Linguistics, Annamalai University
• 2012 – Ph.D. in Linguistics, Annamalai University

• Researcher, ERC NETamil project – “Going from Hand to Hand: Networks of Intellectual Exchange in the Tamil Learned Traditions,” from June 2018 to 2019, then from 2019 to 2020 with funding from the Cluster of Excellence “Understanding Written Artefacts,” University of Hamburg.
• Researcher, ERC ŚIVADHARMA project – “Translocal Identities. The Śivadharma and the Making of Regional Religious Traditions in Premodern South Asia,” from March 2020 to February 2021, then from February 2022 to February 2023.
• Researcher, Hindu Temple Legends in South India project, from October 2022 to December 2022.
• Researcher, TAMILEX project, since March 2023.

• Postdoctoral Researcher, “A04 Teaching Language and Literature: Tamil Manuscripts and Compendia on Grammar” project, Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, University of Hamburg, October 2017–March 2018
• Assistant Professor (on contract), Department of Tamil, Central University of Tamil Nadu, Thiruvarur, 2014–2017
• Postdoctoral Fellow, Central Institute of Classical Tamil, Chennai, April–September 2014
• Research Fellow, CAS in Linguistics, Annamalai University, February 2013–January 2014

Translated with DeepL.com