Dravidian Projects in Europe

Malayalam@Tübingen  & Gundert-Chair

Heike Oberlin has been offering regular Malayāḷam intensive courses in the Dept. of Indology at Tübingen since the winter semester 2008/2009. In October 2015, in close cooperation with the Thunchath Ezhuthachan Malayalam University, the "Gundert Chair" for Malayalam began its work at the University of Tübingen. Prof. Scaria Zacharia, Prof. M. Sreenathan and Prof. T. Anithakumary were already teach Malayalam for different levels. These courses offer a unique opportunity to learn this important South Indian language and are very popular with students, doctoral candidates, post-docs and lecturers from various countries. Contact: heike.oberlin@uni-tuebingen.de.

 

Gundert-Portal 

The Hermann Gundert estate at Tübingen university library contains printed and lithographed books and pamphlets in Malayalam, Kannada, Tulu, Tamil, Telugu, Sanskrit and other languages, Indian manuscripts including several palm-leaf manuscripts, copies of texts and notebooks in various languages by Hermann Gundert and his missionary colleagues. In this portal we have included all 19th century works in South Indian languages that are in the holdings of the University Library, even if they were not strictly speaking from the Gundert legacy. English and German material written by Gundert and his closest colleagues was also added. With a grant from the German Research Foundation (2016-2018) 137.148 pages from 849 titles, including 142 manuscripts, have been digitised and are accessible online under open source license. In addition, nearly 24,000 pages were transcribed by Indian collaborators into machine-readable Malayalam script (Unicode).