Professor E. Annamalai Honored at University of California, Berkeley

The Council for South Asian Studies at the Macmillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale is pleased to announce that Professor E. Annamalai has been honored at the annual Tamil Studies Conference at University of California, Berkeley, where he was the recipient of the Tamil Chairs’ Award for excellence in service to Tamil education in the US. Endowed by the Tamil community in North America, the award is presented to a Tamil scholar who has worked life long to promote the language. Annamalai was recognized, among other things, for his work in establishing the Tamil language program at Yale. As Visiting Professor of Tamil, Annamalai has been with Yale since September 2004, when he arrived to create the Tamil program at Yale University. Tamil language courses are currently offered at the introductory, intermediate, and advanced levels. Students interested in pursuing advanced literature and other studies can do so under his guidance in a Tutorial class, which is specifically geared to the students� interests. Annamalai points to Tamil�s importance as �not just one of the many modern languages of India� but also as a �parallel stream to Sanskrit in defining the Indian civilization.�

Having received his PhD in linguistics from the University of Chicago, Annamalai does research on the grammatical structures of Tamil as well as on the socio-political aspects of the language, specifically language movements, the intersection of language and politics, and the cultural dimensions of language use and attitude. Having studied classical and modern Tamil literature for his graduate degree, Annamalai has been involved in translations of Tamil literary works into English, as well as in making a dictionary of contemporary Tamil. He has served as the Director of the Central Institute of Indian Languages in Mysore, an institution devoted to the development of all Indian languages. He is currently the Secretary-General of the International Association for Tamil Research. His interest lies in language diversity and he has being elected as the Chair of Terra lingua, an international nonprofit organization that works for the maintenance of natural and cultural diversity.

In addition to his Tamil courses at Yale, Annamalai teaches a course on language and politics in colonial India and a course on South Asian literature in translation. Annamalai is a professor known to be devoted to his students, with an impact that �goes well beyond the classroom� in the words of a former student. He encourages students to audit his courses if they cannot take them for credit. To instill a love for the cultural aspects of Tamil, Annamalai assisted one student in finding a dance teacher in the community. Many of Annamalai�s students are of Tamil heritage and express their gratitude at being able to converse or write letters for the first time in Tamil to family members of the older generation. Students come from diverse backgrounds including international students from India who never studied Tamil in school and from Sri Lanka, where the mother tongue is Sinhala.

Though the Tamil program at Yale is young compared to the decade-old programs at the University of Chicago (where Annamalai taught in its formative years), UC Berkeley, or the University of Pennsylvania, Annamalai argues that Yale�s program is unique in that it tries to situate Tamil in a larger context of South Asia that includes Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia that includes Singapore and Malaysia. Tamil is currently offered as a required language part of the second major in South Asian Studies for undergraduates. According to Annamalai, �The special feature of the Yale program is looking through Tamil both in its past and in its present. Tamil has a literary history of more than 2000 years and has a vibrant modern literature. To understand the present, you need to understand the past and to understand the past you need to understand the present.�

Though most Tamil students at Yale study the language for cultural rather than professional interest, coming with different disciplinary training like political science, history, environmental and such, they try to understand the questions in their discipline with their exposure to Tamil. A political science major, for example, wrote a senior essay on modernity as expressed in Tamil novels and short stories, another spent a year in Tamil Nadu working with a non-profit on water conservation, which was motivated by reading temple tanks. Sinhalese students from Sri Lanka are desirous of having insight about the ethnic conflict there and of cultural understanding for harmony.

Of the award, Annamalai says, �I see this award as recognition of the need to enrich the presence of Tamil outside India, particularly in North America. It is specifically in recognition of the growth of the Tamil program at Yale.� However, he says, �the Tamil program at Yale must be continued to be nurtured with care and flexibility to accommodate student interests for some more years until it gets the critical mass of students. To make Tamil attractive to Yale students, it is necessary to engage and expose students to the cultural wealth South India has to offer and to link the importance of Tamil in studying various aspects of modern and classical India�.