CHENNAI: The decades-long resistance to the imposition of Sanskrit on Tamil language and popular culture saw a sudden revival on Thursday with Dravidar Kazhagam (DK) president K Veeramani giving a call to the Tamil people and Chief Minister M Karunanidhi to wake up to what he called a ‘Brahmin conspiracy’ to sneak Grantha characters into the Unicode for Tamil.
He alleged that one Sri Rama Sharma had made an appeal to the Unicode Consortium on July 10 for inclusion of 26 characters of the Grantha script in the Tamil script, which now has space for only 128 characters.
Veeramani said that a set of five Grantha characters - jha, sha, ha, sa and shree - that are sparsely used in Tamil text has already been included in the Unicode while the new set of 26 characters was not used at all in Tamil, be it in the written or spoken form.
When Tamil computer experts were demanding the expansion of the Tamil Unicode to incorporate all the 247 letters of the language’s alphabets, Sharma’s demand smacks of a bid to sneak Sanskrit into Tamil language through the backdoor, he said.
To prove that point, Veermani cited Sharma’s argument that the 26 letters needed to be included in the Unicode to help write Sanskrit. Stating that Sharma had consulted Madras Sanskrit College professor Mani Dravid and Sri Jeyandra Saraswathi Ayurveda College’s Venugopal Sharma before making his plea, Veeramani asked why should Sanskrit scholars’ advice be taken to develop Tamil. On Sharma’s contention that the Granthi characters needed to be included to expand Tamil language, Veeramani said it would instead lead to ‘assassination’ of Tamil and called the bid a ‘cultural invasion’ borne out of jealousy over the growth of Tamil in cyberspace.
Pointing out that Sharma’s reply to a question if the Granthi characters were in contemporary use was ‘yes, occasionally’ and (they were needed) ‘to publish Sanskrit text in Tamil Nadu’, Veeramani said the proof Sharma had produced for that were two old books - one published by Chennai Kamakoti Kodisthanam in 1951 and ‘Bhoja Saritham’ by T S Narayana Sastri in 1916. Making it clear that Tamil and Sanskrit were not the same, Veermani said that Grantha script was used in olden times to write Sanskrit text in southern India.
It was an alternative to the Devanagiri script and was popularised with a view to robbing Tamil of its the individual identity, he said.