Projekte / Projects

https://ngorpa.org

http://netamil.org/

The focus of the project is the digital publication and study of a newly retrieved manuscript of a Hindi Dictionary from 1703 written by a French Capuchin missionary François-Marie de Tours. The original manuscript of the dictionary was considered as lost for a long time but was recently rediscovered in the Bibliothéque Nationale de France. Besides a close study of semantical issues, orthography, phonetics and grammatical aspects of the dictionary the focus is also on its socio-cultural context in order to explore the scope of the encounter of Indians and Europeans in the early colonial period. Furthermore, the project also explores the translatability of cultures and the exchange of ideas. The project is based at the Department for Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University, Sweden and is funded by the Swedish Research Council. The results of the project will be published in digital and book form. The investigators of the project are Prof. Dr. Heinz Werner Wessler, Uppsala University, Sweden and Dr. Ram Prasad Bhatt, Hamburg University, Germany.

Oral tradition reflects the socio-cultural and historical traditions of people passed down to generations by word of mouth. It is not only the repository of peoples’ wisdom, but it also refers to their specific preserved textual and socio-cultural knowledge and their way of perceiving the surrounding world. In this age of modernization and globalization, the oral traditions, along with the native tongues and distinctive social practices that are particularly relevant to a community and help reinforce a sense of identity and continuity with the past, are rapidly being lost. This is very much visible in the central Himalayan region of India. Due to a number of reasons, such as modernization, migration, construction of huge hydropower projects etc. the cultural traditions, customs and languages of the region are disappearing very rapidly. For these reasons, UNESCO has listed Garhwali in the category of endangered languages. This project focuses on collecting and documenting the oral traditions of the Garhwali people and its aims are to ensure the preservation of knowledge, experiences and study the socio-cultural phenomena and the cultural continuity unique to the central Himalayan region of India.

A research team that includes Prof. Dr. Claus Peter Zoller, Oslo University, Norway, Dr. Ram Prasad Bhatt, University Hamburg, Germany, and Prof. Dr. Heinz Werner Wessler, Uppsala University, Sweden is carrying out this collaborative research project.