[INDOLOGY] François Gros (1933-2021)

[Srilata Raman]

Dear Colleagues,

It is with deep sadness that I wish to share with you the news of the passing of Professor François Gros in Lyons, France at the age of 88.
François Édouard Stéphane Gros was a child of a France still actively connected to the Second World War. He was born and grew up and lived his last years in Lyons, France in a street named after his namesake, his grandfather François Gros, a Latin scholar. Having received a classical French education, he studied pre-history under André Leroi-Gourhan and  learned anthropology from Louis Dumont and sociology and economic history from Daniel Thorner. Senior to him at the Fondation Thiers, Paris was Michel Foucault. He began his working life as a French Teacher in Algeria and his deep and abiding interest in Tamil Studies began with his frequent visits to Pondicherry from 1963 onwards, to study the Tamil language and literature. He founded a number of important research programmes at The French Institute, Pondicherry including the project that resulted in the Historical Atlas of South India, working actively and collaboratively with many generations of Indian scholars. He was an important  consultant on the translation and lexicographical projects of the Chennai based Cre-A publishers. François Gros was unusual in Tamil Studies for his vast erudition, not just of premodern Tamil literature but also of the contemporary literary landscape, seeing the entire Tamil literature through a capacious vision of what linked the old and the new. He was also an extraordinary and discerning collector of Tamil printed materials – assembling a unique, and now extremely rare and valuable private collection of Tamil books,  and also works on European studies of South India beginning from the 17th century. Starting in 2018 he collaborated actively with Srilata Raman at Toronto and M. Kannan of the French Institute, Pondicherry in donating the core of approximately 10,000 books of this invaluable resource for Tamil Studies to the University of Toronto where it is currently housed  and in the process of being catalogued. The rare works of the Gros Collection of the University of Toronto Libraries will be made available to scholars through free digital access once the pandemic is over and the work can be completed. Those of us in Tamil Studies today remember and mourn the passing of a scholar of breadth and vision in the field and we who knew him personally also a delightful and deeply lovable human being.

with warm regards,
Srilata Raman,
Associate Professor of Hinduism,
University of Toronto.

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