A significant development for Malayalam language that went almost unnoticed last week was the appointment of linguist Scaria Zacharia as ‘Gundert Chair’ at the University of Tubingen in Germany — a rich repository of archival knowledge pertaining to Malayalam language which also includes the over 42,000-page palm leaf manuscripts by Herman Gundert himself.
The appointment, done in the wake of an agreement between the University of Tubingen and Thunchath Ezhuthachan Malayalam University, is believed to catalyse learning of Malayalam language overseas.
“Right now, we don’t have any scheme to promote learning of Malayalam by foreigners. One of the initiatives of the new chair would be to formulate schemes to foster Malayalam overseas,” says Prof. Zacharia, who, along with scholar Albrecht Frenz, stumbled on the ‘Thalassery manuscripts’ of missionary-turned-scholar Gundert at the University of Tubingen way back in 1986.
“Tubingen has a full-scale course in Malayalam and my aim would be to draw up plans to expand the contours of Kerala Studies at the university,” says Prof. Zacharia, who will formally join the institution on October 9. The Government of India and the UGC had ratified the appointment.
Over the next three years of his new assignment, he would focus on classifying and cataloguing the archived knowledge that’s being digitised as part of a massive project at the university. German Research Foundation if funding the mission.
Prof Zacharia, who headed the Malayalam department at Sree Sankara University of Sanskrit, has contributed to intercultural studies when he collated, with support from Israel’s Hebrew University, Jewish women’s songs in Malayalam in an anthology titled, Karkuzhali .
His study of Gundert’s legacy to the language, with Gundert’s writings themselves, would be soon brought out by Malayalam University.
