Vigneshwaran Muralidaran

Vigneshwaran Muralidaran is a researcher at the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), Pondicherry Center. He is currently preparing a digital critical edition and an annotated English translation of Kacciyappa Muṉivar’s Kāñcippurāṇam, as part of the project Hinduistische Tempellegenden in Südindien / Hindu Temple Legends in South India, dedicated to the study of textual and narrative traditions associated with the temples of Kanchipuram.

In addition to this digital edition, which forms the core of his work, he examines the narratives of the Kāñcippurāṇam in relation to other medieval Tamil works associated with Kanchipuram, notably the Kantapurāṇam and the Periyapurāṇam, as well as shorter compositions, such as another Kāñcippurāṇam written in the kaṭṭaḷaikkalittuṟai meter. He also studies the text as a poetic work by comparing it to the conventions of medieval Tamil literature, particularly in the Kampa Rāmāyaṇam and the Periyapurāṇam. His research also focuses on the poetic meters used in the text, paying attention to the differences between the metrical identifications in the manuscripts and those in the printed editions. He is also interested in Tamil epigraphy and recently presented a paper on mathematical calculations attested in inscriptions from the Chola dynasty.

More broadly, his research focuses on classical Tamil literature, particularly the māhātmyas and talapurāṇams, as well as grammatical texts and their commentaries, the linguistic analysis of Tamil Śaivite prose, and issues in metrical theory. Trained in computational linguistics, he has also worked on the development of language technologies for several Indian languages and for Welsh.

• 2016, PhD in Computational Linguistics, Cardiff University
• 2013–2016, Master’s by Research, International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad (IIIT-H), India
• 2010, Bachelor’s in Computer Science, India

• Researcher, project “Networks of Hindu Temples in Premodern South India: Narratives, Rituals, and Material Culture,” funded by the DFG, Pondicherry Center, June 1–August 31, 2022.
• Researcher (Research Cooperation Contract), project “Hindu Temple Legends in South India,” funded by the Academies’ Program of the German Research Foundation (DFG), Pondicherry Center, since October 1, 2022.

• Assistant Professor, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, 2021–2022
  Research Software Engineer, Data Innovation Research Institute, Cardiff University, 2020–2021
• Ph.D. Researcher, National Corpus of Contemporary Welsh (CorCenCC) project [ES/M011348/1], Cardiff
• University, 2017–2019
  Researcher, Indian Languages Machine Translation (ILMT) project, International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad, 2013–2016
• Software Engineer, Cognizant Technology Solutions, 2010–2013

Translated with DeepL.com