So I'm writing this paper for lit class on the role of Sanskrit vis a vis the role of Tamil at Berkeley (and in the wider scheme of American universities) and for this I did some interviews for most of my information. There were a bunch of folks I could have talked to, but time constraints meant that I could only talk to three -- Dr. and Mrs. Hart and Dr. Emaneau.
Now, the last came as something of a shock and awe to me. I didn't even know he was still alive, much less eager to help out puny 19-year-old undergrads with lit papers. This guy was publishing work in the thirties. He did a lot of really cool stuff both in Dravidian linguistics and in getting into the anthropology of terms in Sanskrit. He wrote a paper on just what 'bark cloth' probably was in old Indian society (most authors just say 'bark cloth' and leave it at that, having no idea what it is) and how the compound bow worked in ancient times and things of that nature that I really really love. His Dravida stuff mostly centered around preservation of endangered tribal languages and folkways of the Nilgiris. He also did work in Greek, Latin and Vietnamese. His total works essentially span the entire 20th century.
So there I was, sitting in his living room on Thursday with the Harts. It was like some sort of bizarre domestic scene. Kausalya essentially had to drag her very reluctant husband onto this jaunt because only he had a loud enough voice to ask the 99-year-old man our questions. Unfortunately, Dr. Emaneau tended to let every question lead to reminisces about his childhood home in Nova Scotia (which was kinda funny). I just listened patiently, still stunned to be in such a famous scholar's presence, but Kausalya was agitated and kept demanding that George ask him about Sanskrit teachers at Harvard. He, of course, kept shushing 'mudiyathu!' and 'illai, Kausalya!'
After a while, Kausalya finally vetoed George's insistance that she not ask to look at Murray's bookshelf -- and the old scholar was more than happy to hobble over with us to his study and lend a book or two that he thought would be helpful to me. While we where there, he lovingly removed his copy of his 'magnum opus' in Dravidian studies, a thousand-page tome entitled _Toda Songs_. He opened to the first two plates -- a portrait of a bearded elder and a 'ethnographic style' photo of a young woman wrapped in a woolen blanket. "He was my informant," he mused. "You can see that he doesn't look anything like the people in the flatlands." He liked using that term for ethnic Tamils. "Both the men and the women wore these blankets -- it's very cold in the hills. Subtropical, not tropical like in the flatlands." His fingers came to rest on the image of the woman. "She was quite pretty," he sighed wistfully.
I remembered what my mother told me about my grandmother. My aunt once asked her what she thought about as she lay day in and day out on her bed or on the couch, and she replied that she thought of her childhood and life as a young woman. I think Dr. Emaneau published his last work in the early 1990s, a joint work with Kausalya on some aspect of Tamil grammar. Now he was more interested in reminiscing about his life more than sixty years ago high in the Blue Mountains with the Dravidian-speaking tribals.
I truly wish I could have stayed longer and listened to him talking about his life in and love for a culture that has since essentially become extinct (or at least changed so drastically in that time) between then and now. However, George was markedly uncomfortable there. It was strange. Here's the very scholar I came to Berkeley to study under -- someone whose gaze I always feel uncomfortable meeting because I've idolized him for so many years -- and I still feel kind of angry at him for being so..I don't know..callous? resentful?.. toward /his/ elder. Maybe someday I'll find out the history between those two.
Oh, what prompted me to write this was my 'Works Cited' page in my essay, which I /should/ actually be working on rather than blogging. In the line that says 'Interview by author,' I was musing over changing it to 'Interview by Dr. G. Hart with prompting by K. Hart, patiently listened to by author'.
But my lit teacher is a Sanskrit student, and we can't let on that there really is some wacky dynamics between Tamil scholars. Of course not. It'd be bad for our image.
;)
Hi. Welcome to Wasla Dar Lashkar (the armed war-party).
Why an armed war-party? What does vengeance served Pashto-style have to do with a weblog from Berkeley?
It does when you have a bipolar South Asian Studies undergrad taking out all her aggressions on the world through the medium of said Berkeley weblog. So there you have it. At least it keeps her from forming a real lashkar, which she often contemplates.
I guess I could introduce myself. I'm Maria Packman. I go to school at UC Berkeley (fancy that). My current specialty is Tamil language, but I have a two-year degree in Japanese language and am pondering doing some grad work in Pakistan studies (especially Quaid-e-Azam studies). I have a strong interest in Sri Lankan current affairs and am trying to dig up the time and energy to really pursue self-study in Sinhalese. Yes, I do enjoy language learning immensely and am nearing the end of my first semester in Yiddish in addition to having classroom study experience in Tamil, Japanese, Spanish and Latin. However, if you sit me down with any sort of learning material in any language, I'll happily pore over it for hours.
All the language and political study helps me put the world and things that happen in my own life in perspective. Sometimes I think it's the only thing that keeps me from going crazy.
So then what am I doing here? This is probably going to be my forum for a lot of kvetching, some gloating and some reasonably neutral commentary. Perhaps even bits and pieces of creative things will show up, but no promises.
I've been away from weblogging for a few months. As the title says, though, 'I grow weary of this continued idleness.' I hope that, in addition to being theraputic to me, this real-time chronicle of life is entertaining or useful to you, kind public.