B.G.L.Swamy

[Jean-Luc Chevillard]

At 11:17 07/12/01 +0100, Herman Tieken wrote:
>[...] Francois
>Gros' characterization of Dr. B.G.L. Swamy as an iconoclast is undeserved.

The exact wording of prof. GROS' argument
and its context (unless you are quoting from another
of his essays) is:

"[...] This points up the misappreciation of Tamil chronology,
"under which laboured the British authors
"of the 19th century, such as G.U. Pope, the Tamil specialist
"or Nelson, the editor of gazetteers, whoi placed the tEvAram
"in the 13th or even 14th century. But are we justified in thinking
"that, when P. Sudaram Pillai in 1895 in an article entitled
" `Some Milestones in the History of Tamil Literature
" or the Age of Tirugnana sambanda', which was widely
"distributed and printed, dared to place this poet in the 7th c.
"he was succumbing to the opposite type of excess?
"Eighty years had to pass before the question was again
"posed, in iconoclastic terms, in a series of articles
"and talks by B.G.L. Swamy which tended to show
"that the tEvAram could not have existed prior to the 10th c."

(p. xli, "Towards reading the Tevaram", in _Tevaram_, PIFI 68.1, 1984,
French Institute of Pondicherry)


Of course, only prof. Gros himself could say
what he means exactly when using these words
but I don't think he is on this list.

Regards

-- Jean-Luc Chevillard (Paris)