By sheer magnitude, scale of organization, participation of scholars and people – the World Classical Tamil Conference at Coimbatore between June 23 and 27, is unparalleled and unprecedented for any meet of its kind. It was an epoch-making event as it was the first global meet convened after Tamil was granted the status of a Classical Language by the Government of India in 2004. In terms of sheer number of participants and papers, this meet exceeded the eight World Tamil conferences between 1966 and 1995. The first meet could only mobilize 132 delegates and 40 observers for the Kuala Lumpur meet, while the Coimbatore meet saw 1,020 scholars from 50 countries presenting papers at the 22 halls that were erected in the sprawling venue. Even the number of observers had gone up by several times – 1,348 from India and 315 from overseas. But what was more important was the overwhelming response that the conference evoked after it was announced. Totally 7,356 persons (556 foreigners) registered for the event and 1,086 of them (296 from abroad) sent in their synopsis for the papers that they wanted to present. However, only 1,020 research papers were accepted – more than 200 of the papers were in English.
The papers covered a wide range of subjects on literature, culture and lifestyle from pre-historic Sangam period to the present era of information technology. A comprehensive coverage of subjects was planned; topics such as the Impact of Dalitism and Modern Existentialism in Tamil writing were discussed. But it was the path-breaking move to introduce ‘transgender literature’ as a topic for discussion that made the meet stand apart from the earlier ones. Keeping with modern social trends, not only were transgenders given an opportunity to present their perspective through their writings, a play highlighting the pains of the community was staged as part of the academic activities. Titled ‘Valiaruppu’ (Cutting the pain), the play produced by the Thanjavur Tamil University, saw transgenders take to the stage.
Such assemblies and interactions of learned men and women should not be underestimated. Several research organizations, universities and private bodies organize seminars and symposiums at local, regional and national levels. But those deliberations and research papers presented in such forum never transcend the boundaries of four walls. Most often, they are never published as books or in journals. But the DMK government now had published all the papers presented during the Eighth World Tamil Conference held at Thanjavur in 1995. (under ADMK regime) which are made available in libraries.agri
The approach towards ancient literature has changed drastically. While it was viewed as mere literature in the past, the present day readers look at them as reflections of the socio-economic and cultural lives of the people. People now look beyond love and valour in Sangam literature to understand the progression of human beings from a food gathering to food producing race. They give vivid picture of developments in agriculture technology, water resources management and change of crop patterns. They also captured the changes in the social fibre.
In addition to conventional literature, studies were conducted on inscriptions, archeological findings, coins, folk art and literature and records of foreign travellers. Instead of looking at each of them in isolation, the new tendency is to have as inter-disciplinary approach in unravelling the hidden mysteries of the past. Also areas of studies in Tamilology have undergone bifurcations and trifurcations, many a time. As new fields emerge, so do new researches. World Tamil conferences serve the purpose of assimilating research activities in all such diverse fields. When such conferences are held in regular intervals, they capture the progress in Tamil studies in the intervening periods and set the stage for further exploration. Tamil research has undergone a sea change since Thanjavur conference. The present conference by and large filled the vaccum in interaction of scholars created in the intervening period.
To usher in renewed interest in Tamil among the people and to draw the attention of the youth, whose attitude towards humanities and literature verges on indifference, it has become pertinent that the glory of Tamil is highlighted. The younger generation would gain some insight into the role that Tamil played in shaping the destiny of the state politically, socially and culturally through all the excitement over the Tamil conference. On the sidelines of the meet, cultural programmes, exhibitions, rallies, public sections, debates and poetry sessions depicting Tamil history, life and traditions were organized. There is no doubt that these events were thought provoking and could leave a lasting impression in the minds of people. When scholars from across the globe converge at a place in large numbers, it should not remain detached from the common man. In a changed atmosphere where anything and everything brimmed with Tamil, serious sessions permeated through the mental barriers and filled the eyes and ears of even those who gathered to witness the public events. The imperative that serious researches and findings reach the general public in some form or the other, was achieved to a great extent going by the massive turnout of people at the conference venue and for the procession of pageants and the interest evinced by all sections of the society. Evidently this was because of the significance of Coimbatore conference seeing a Tamil scholar and writer (Kalaignar) presiding over the meet as popular Chief Minister, after the Chennai event of 1968 (when Arignar Anna was at the helm).
Thus having fulfilled the need of reminding Tamils living in our country and all over the world of the antiquity and rich heritage of their language and culture, the conference also simultaneously attempted to enlarge and enrich the language relevant to the requirements of modern life.
The Tamil Internet Conference-2010 conducted along with the World Classical Tamil Conference received enthusiastic response. The main objectives of the conference were to showcase the development of Tamil Internet till date and to identify steps required to increase the use of Tamil language in Internet, to establish a wide network between Tamil literary scholars and Tamil Internet developers and to motivate the younger generation to use Tamil on the Internet. About 400 special invitees/ speakers/ delegates and experts from 15 countries participated in the conference.
Prominent international experts who attended the conference included Prof. Schiffman (USA), Dr. Jean-Luc Chevillard, France and Prof. Ulrike Niklas, Germany, Ms. Lisa Moore, Chair, Unicode Technical Committee, Vice President, Unicode Consortium and senior Manager, IBM Corporation.
Information Technology, in respect of the use of Tamil on computers, should necessarily aim to reach all the people so as to give them the benefits of this new technological power. People should be able to use computers to deal with information given in Tamil without knowledge of English on the part of the user. Some of the current research and development efforts address such issues.
The Tamil community is suddenly waking up to all the missed opportunities after realising how far Tamil language is falling behind many other languages. This was evident from the degree of enthusiasm and cooperation seen in putting together the Tamil Internet Conference (TIC-2010), thanks to unstinted support from the Government of Tamil Nadu. Nearly 400 international experts will discuss some 150 research papers dealing with a range of topics involving contemporary developments in Tamil computing. The papers on Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing included developments in Text to Speech, Syntactic Parsing, Character Recognition, Spell Check and so on. Several papers discussed approaches to Bilingual Data Bases, Electronic Tamil Libraries, Tamil in Mobile Devices, Tamil Search Engines, and Processing Large Data Bases in Tamil. Some explained methods of computer-assisted Tamil Teaching, Tamil Blogging and Tamil Content Development in Wikipedia. Many ideas had been advanced to carry the work forward through the next several years through special efforts in areas such as computational linguistics, and the collection of a large bank of Bi-lingual Corpora of some two million sentences.
One of the basic objectives of TIC-2010 was to stimulate the interest of the younger generation in Tamil computing. The enthusiastic response from school and college students to the Tamil computing competition and Wikipedia had been encouraging. This needs to be sustained and expanded. The special participatory exposition of Tamil computing and Internet developments, including e-governance, Tamil periodicals, Tamil software, Tamil-related efforts of several multinational companies and so on are expected to attract the interest of lakhs of visitors. The enthusiasm and the level of expectations are evident. The spirit of cooperation needs to be sustained.
Now that information technology has taken deep roots over the world and internet becoming the most important source of communication and knowledge and likely to replace all other media in the near future, the important challenge is to motivate the younger generation to use Tamil on the net. Internet use grows not by providing infrastructure but by a rich content to attract people to the Net.
The Tamil Nadu Government and Tamil Wikipedia conducted a competition for college students and members of public to increase Tamil content in the online free encyclopaedia. They invited students of arts, science, engineering, medical, agricultural, law, physiotherapy, sports and para-medical colleges to participate in the competition and offered prizes.
The participants came up with articles on any topic other than those already in Tamil Wikipedia, based on facts, and those that did not incite caste, religious or communal disaffection. 329 engineering, 81 medical, 65 veterinary science, 28 law, 225 arts, 11 physical education, 290 agriculture science totaling 1,200 articles were received. As many as 2,720 persons had registered for participation. A 31-member jury from across the world evaluated and approved the articles, which were uploaded.
In his article on the conference in an English daily recently, Kalaignar had said “If wholehearted and overwhelming participation of people is held as the benchmark for the success of any event, then the WCTC will be a grand success, more so because it blends the classical glory and contemporary relevance of the language, literature, culture and values of Tamil and Tamil people.” Obviously the conference was a grand success!
Way back in 1949, the former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru said: “A language now must fulfil two functions; it must base itself on its ancient roots and, at the same time, vary and expand with growing needs, becoming essentially the language of the masses, and not of a select coterie.”
Tamil has the distinction of being the only living classical language in the world essentially because it was always, through ages, the language of the masses; who cherished their mother tongue and kept it alive and vibrant, braving all alien invasions and impositions, even in the absence of any major literary works for several centuries together. It was, it is and it will be a people’s language, that will keep flourishing with time. On this occasion, let us salute our unknown, unsung ancestors who safely handed over to us the ‘baton’ of classical Tamil and vouch to pass it on to our future generations, more developed and vibrant than before!
(27-06-10)
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