CHENNAI: Oceanography, adolescent psychology, vascular differences in plants and anthropology are among the subjects of Tamil texbooks between 1960 and 1980. Lost over decades of English education, these books have got a new lease of life, after the Tamil Nadu Textbook and Educational Services Corporation decided to archive them for posterity.
Sitting on an inconspicuous shelf of the corporation are over 900 rare books that are barely found in the market. “These books contain rare Tamil words that are unknown among new-age Tamil speakers,” said D Jagannathan, managing director of the textbook corporation.
Tamil word for differential co-efficient, for example, is vagaikezhu, nomography (study of alignment charts used for graphical calculation) is nemavaraiiyal and a book on complex numbers is called Sikkalengal thathuvam. The associated technical words too are all present in Tamil. “The technical words we are hunting for in Tamil already exist... we just have to identify them from these books,” he said.
Over 1,000 books were identified by the government and a 15-member panel painstakingly collected each book from libraries and bookshops even in remote parts of the State. The hardest books to locate were the ones that have lost commercial value these days, said Dr Sankara Saravanan, deputy director of the textbook corporation, who was engaged in collecting the books.
“Old geography textbooks, for example, are useless to people today. However, the old maps and historical names of certain places are of treasurable importance for documentation,” he said.
While old researchers still had copies of these books, the hardest to find among all books was ‘History of Tamil Shorthand’ (Tamil Sutrrezhuthu Varalaaru). Saravanan claimed that only one copy of the book was available at an old library when they found it.
Among the 900 books that they have completely documented, 190 were selected and over 600 copies of these were made to be circulated to all district libraries in the city. Copies of these books were also made available at the Chennai Book Fair this year.
Pointing to a book on history of Chola dynasty, a shopkeeper at the book fair remarked, “A 500-page book like this one on Chola dynasty will cost you over `500. But since these books are being archived by the government, you can get it delivered at your house for `80 for one part alone.”
The first phase of the project comprises only preserving the old textbooks as they are and the second phase would involve updating them to suit current scenarios.
However, to combat the immediate problem of having poor reading materials that are on a par with English language books, the textbook corporation is working towards translating popular educational textbooks into Tamil. “We realised that authoring new technical books for education and competitive exams will be time-consuming. So we decided to translate popular books instead,” said Saravanan.
He added that the textbook board has worked out an understanding with publishers such as Penguin, Oxford and Pearson to translate their books in Tamil to be supplied at subsidised rates. Most of the translated books can be seen at Tamil Virtual Academy’s website www.tamilvu.org.