Remembering the 'Saint of the Gutter'

When a poor person dies of hunger, it has not happened because God did not take care of him or her. It has happened because neither you nor I wanted to give that person what he or she needed... If words could reveal sentiments, it could not have been expressed any better than by Mother Teresa.

Simplicity, piety and charity headlined the life of the 'Saint of the Gutter'. On her birth centenary, we trace the story of her extraordinary love and dedication for poor, homeless and the needy

Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu on August 26, 1910, in Skopje, Macedonia, in the former Yugoslavia, she was the youngest of three children. In her teens, Agnes became a member of a youth group in her local parish called Sodality.

Through her involvement with their activities guided by a Jesuit priest, Agnes became interested in missionaries. At age 17, she responded to her first call of a vocation as a Catholic missionary nun.

She joined an Irish order, the Sisters of Loretto, a community known for their missionary work in India. When she took her vows as a Sister of Loretto, she chose the name Teresa after Saint Therese of Lisieux.

In Kolkata (then Calcutta), Sister Teresa taught geography and cathechism at St Mary's High School.

In 1944, she became the principal of St Mary's. Soon Sister Teresa contracted tuberculosis, was unable to continue teaching and was sent to Darjeeling for rest and recuperation.

It was on the train to Darjeeling that she received her second call -- 'the call within the call'.

Mother Teresa recalled later, 'I was to leave the convent and work with the poor, living among them. It was an order. I knew where I belonged but I did not know how to get there.'

In 1948, the Vatican granted Sister Teresa permission to leave the Sisters of Loretto and pursue her calling under the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Calcutta.

Mother Teresa started with a school in the slums to teach the children of the poor.

She also learned basic medicine and went into the homes of the sick to treat them. In 1949, some of her former pupils joined her.

They found men, women, and children dying on the streets who were rejected by local hospitals.

The group rented a room so they could care for helpless people otherwise condemned to die in the gutter. In 1950, the group was established by the church as a Diocesan Congregation of the Calcutta Diocese.

It was known as the Missionaries of Charity.

In 1952 the first Home for the Dying was opened in space made available by Calcutta. Over the years, Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity grew from 12 to thousands serving the "poorest of the poor" in 450 centres around the world.

Mother Teresa created many homes for the dying and the unwanted from Calcutta to New York to Albania.

She was one of the pioneers of establishing homes for AIDS victims. For more than 45 years, Mother Teresa comforted the poor, the dying, and the unwanted around the world.

In 1966, the Missionaries of Charity Brothers was founded. Homes began to open in Rome, Tanzania, and Australia. In 1971, the first home in the United States was established in the South Bronx, New York.

Mother Teresa gained worldwide acclaim with her tireless efforts on behalf of world peace.

Her work brought her numerous humanitarian awards, including the Pope John XXIII Peace Prize and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

In receiving this award, Mother Teresa revolutionised the award ceremony.

She insisted on a departure from the ceremonial banquet and asked that the funds, $6,000 be donated to the poor in Calcutta.

This money would permit her to feed hundreds for a year.

Mother Teresa travelled to help the hungry in Ethiopia, radiation victims at Chernobyl, and earthquake victims in Armenia.

Her zeal and works of mercy knew no boundaries. In November of 1996, Mother Teresa received the honorary US citizenship.

In October 2003, the Pope beatified her, paving the way for her canonization (being declared a saint). She qualified for beatification after Vatican officials acknowledged that she was responsible for a miracle in which an Indian woman was cured of stomach cancer through her intervention.

Mother Teresa died at the age of 87 on September 5, 1997. Her life and work are still alive as a prayer...

"Make us worthy, Lord, to serve those people throughout the world who live and die in poverty and hunger. Give them through our hands, this day, their daily bread, and by our understanding love, give them peace and joy."

Tolkappiyam is not dependent on Sanskrit sources: Tamil scholar

Tolkappiyam is not dependent on Sanskrit sources and a work that demanded not only vast knowledge but also a lot of thinking from its author, according to Alexander Dubyanskiy, veteran Tamil scholar from Moscow State University.

“Many scholars (have) pointed out that Tolkappiyam is dependent on Sanskrit sources. It is said that its author, Tolkappiyanar followed the Aindra School of linguistics. Subrahmanya Sastri, a scholar who studied Tolkappiyam, even stated that some parts of the work were translations of some portions of Panini's Ashtadhyayi, Yaska's Nirukta, Rigveda Pratishakya, etc., which according to me is not right,” he said in his paper presented at the World Classical Tamil Conference on Sunday.

“I think it is not correct because at those times the process of interaction of texts was connected not with translating but with rendering and, speaking generally, there was nothing unusual in borrowing or using ideas from other sources.”

The author of Tolkappiyam was a well educated person who used the works available to build a construction of his own and place the same in the mainstream Indian theoretical linguistic thought.

He said that it was known that Tolkappiyanar did not try to conceal his indebtedness to his predecessors and often used – around 150 times – expressions which clearly signified them.

Vast knowledge

“I am sure that Tolkappiyam is a work which demanded not only vast knowledge and a lot of thinking but a considerable creative skill from its composer.”

Dr. Dubyanskiy also said, “Interestingly enough, there are cases when Tolkappiyanar himself shows his independence on the Sanskrit tradition.” He quoted a verse to underscore his point.

“Besides, one should not forget that Tolkappiyanar described not an Indo-Aryan [language], but Tamil, a language of a different family with its own phonetics and grammatical structure and he could not copy the sources blindly.”

In his tribute to Tolkappiyanar, the professor said that though nothing much was known about him, he seemed to be a person of great intellect, deep thought and an open mind.

On Tamil and its classical status, he said any classical language presented itself in a fixed verbal form that was in the form of a certain kind of treatise, a text describing and analysing the structure and specific features of the language or literature, prescribing rules and regulations for them.

Like Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, Tamil too had such texts, he said and added “during more than 2,000 years of its development, Tamil tradition produced a great quantity of such texts. Many of them are very famous like ‘Nannool,' ‘Yaaparunkalam,' ‘Agapporul,' among others.”

“Together with commentaries they made a vast section of literature of a special kind, very important and interesting. And, in the beginning of the theoretical tradition stood Tolkappiyam, a treatise connected with Tamil classical poetry.”

Dr. Dubyanskiy further said that the authority of the text was undeniable. “It is a literary and cultural monument of great importance.”

Parpola and the Indus ஸ்கிரிப்ட் - ஐராவதம் Mahadevan

In the recent interview with Asko Parpola published in The Hindu (April 15, 2010), readers were made aware of the lasting contributions by Professor Parpola to Indological studies, especially in the field of the Indus Civilisation and its script. Having known him personally for four decades and having closely watched his great contribution to the study of the Indus script, I am in a position to amplify the information provided in the interview.

Professor Parpola's contributions to Harappan studies are truly monumental, and these are not confined merely to the study of the Indus script. He has published a long series of brilliant papers to establish the fact of Aryan immigration into South Asia after the decline of the Indus Civilisation. As a Vedic scholar-turned-Dravidianist, he has the best academic credentials to prove that the Indus Civilisation was pre-Aryan and that its writing encoded a Dravidian language. In addition to his linguistic skills and deep scholarship of Vedic Sanskrit and the Dravidian languages, he has harnessed the computer in one of the earliest scientific attempts to study the structure of the Indus texts through computational linguistic procedures. Professor Parpola has produced the first truly scientific concordance to the Indus inscriptions. His concordance is accurate and exhaustive and has become an indispensable tool for researchers in the field.

Equally impressive, and again truly monumental, are the publications inspired and co-authored by Professor Parpola, of two volumes of the Corpus of Indus Seals and Inscriptions. These volumes reproduce in amazing clarity and detail all the Indus seals (and their newly-made impressions) and other inscriptions. I happen to know personally the enormous difficulties Professor Parpola faced in publishing these volumes, nudging and goading the slow-moving bureaucracy in India and Pakistan to make available the originals, most of which were photographed again by the expert whom Professor Parpola sent from Finland for the purpose.

He published his magnum opus in 1994, Deciphering the Indus Script. The book contains the best exposition of the Dravidian hypothesis relating to the Indus Civilisation and its writing. Even though the Indus script remains undeciphered, as Professor Parpola readily admits, his theoretical groundwork on the Dravidian character of the Indus Civilisation and the script, and the fact of Aryan immigration into India after the decline of the Indus Civilisation, have been accepted by most scholars in the world.

Most of the Early Dravidian speakers of North and Central India switched over to the dominant Indo-Aryan languages in Post-Harappan times. Speakers of Aryan languages have indistinguishably merged with speakers of Dravidian and Munda languages millennia ago, creating a composite Indian society containing elements inherited from every source. It is thus likely that the Indus art, religious motifs and craft editions survived and can be traced in Sanskrit literature from the days of the Rigveda, and also in Old Tamil traditions recorded in the Sangam poems. Professor Parpola is aware of the Harappan heritage of both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages, the former culturally and the latter linguistically. His profound scholarship in both families of languages enables him to mine the Indian cultural heritage holistically in his search for clues to solve the mysteries of the Indus script.

It may be asked: What has Tamil to do with the Indus script that Professor Parpola should be honoured with the inaugural Classical Tamil Award? Tamil happens to be the oldest and the best-documented Dravidian language. It is mainly for this reason that the Dravidian Etymological Dictionary of Burrow and Emeneau accords the head position to Tamil entries in the dictionary. That this distinction is well-deserved is also proved by the fact that Old Tamil contains the most archaic features of Dravidian phonology and morphology, like for example, the retention of the character aytam and the sound zh. Dravidian linguists have also established that most proto-Dravidian reconstructions are in close accord with words in Old Tamil. The earliest Tamil inscriptions date from the Mauryan Era. The earliest Tamil literature, the Sangam works, are from the early centuries of the Common Era, but record oral traditions from a much earlier time. It is for this reason that Professor Parpola and other Dravidian researchers consider Old Tamil to be a possible route to get at the language of the Indus inscriptions.

Professor Parpola speaks for himself in the following excerpt from his message of acceptance of the Classical Tamil Award. He says: “When the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu's award is given to me for a Dravidian solution of the Indus enigma, this award will inevitably be interpreted by many people as politically motivated. Nevertheless, I am ready to fight for the truth, and in my opinion, the Tamils are entitled to some pride for having preserved so well the linguistic heritage of the Indus Civilisation. At the same time, it must not be forgotten that though their language has shifted in the course of millennia, people of North India too are to a large extent descended from the Harappan people, and have also preserved cultural heritage of the same civilisation.”

Professor Parpola's work on the Indus script will prove to be as important and as long-lasting as U.Ve. Swaminathaiyar's resurrection of the Tamil Classics from decaying palm leaves. He richly deserves the honour of being the first recipient of the Classical Tamil Award instituted by the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister.

(Iravatham Mahadevan is a noted epigraphist and Tamil scholar.)