Tamil To Be Taught At Yale University

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WASHINGTON, U.S., April 28, 2004: Tamil language and culture will soon be taught at the prestigious Yale University, one of the Ivy League institutions in the U.S. This was announced at a reception by economics professor T.N. Srinivasan, chair of the South Asian Studies Council at Yale University. He said a number of South Asian languages, including Bengali, Urdu, Hindi, Nepali and others were already being taught at Yale, and now Tamil studies will be available from fall this year. Yale’s connection to South Asia goes back to its naming after its patron Elihu Yale, governor of the British East India Company’s Fort St. George from 1687 to 1692 in what is today Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu. Spoken by some 80 million people worldwide today, Tamil is one of the world’s three oldest continuous literary traditions and is a national language in five nation states. Srinivasan told IANS that nearly 900 students signed a petition for including in the South Asian Studies (SAS) curriculum the teaching of Tamil language, culture and history. The SAS Council thus proposes to appoint a fulltime lecturer and to offer regular credit courses in Tamil. Professor Gustav Ranis, director of the Yale Centre for International and Area Studies, said: “South Asia is a part of the developing world which, I believe, is poised to move up in importance, politically and culturally and economically more than any other region over the coming decades.”