Historical dictionary of Classical Tamil
TamilexHistorical dictionary
of Classical Tamil
of Classical Tamil
Presenting the ERC project MIRA
10 June 2026, 2:15 pm
Photo: Suganya Anandakichenin
Presenting the ERC project MIRA
Suganya Anandakichenin
Manipravalam, the hybrid literary language that combines Sanskrit and Tamil, played a central role in the religious, intellectual, and cultural history of South India during the second millennium. While scholarship has traditionally focused on the highly theorized Manipravalam tradition of Kerala, the rich and diverse Tamil-region corpus—particularly among Śrīvaiṣṇavas, Jains, and Śaivas—remains comparatively understudied. This presentation introduces MIRA (Manipravalam: Insight, Research, and Analysis), a five-year ERC Consolidator Grant project that seeks to investigate Manipravalam as a linguistic, literary, and religious phenomenon through philological, comparative, and digital-humanities approaches. By examining multiple sectarian traditions and developing new research tools, including the processing, OCR correction, and database integration of a major unpublished Manipravalam dictionary, MIRA aims to transform our understanding of this important but still insufficiently explored component of South India's intellectual heritage.
This talk will take place at 10 June, 2026, at 14:15 in Alsterterrasse 1, R-113. This will be a hybrid event; for the Zoom link, contact Charles Li(charles.li"AT"uni-hamburg.de).
