Charlotte Schmid
Voices from the South: the EFEO Centre in Pondicherry and the Beginning of Writing in South India
The opening of the Centre of the EFEO in Pondicherry in 1955 was spurred by an EFEO research project that, from Southeast Asia to the south of India, had been radically different from the one initiated during the colonial period in the north of India and was marked, amongst other things, by the emergence of a Dravidian identity in the south of India since the end to the 19th century. After an outline of the history of this EFEO Centre, highlighting the scientific approach of the Ecole with its attention to evidence from both the field and the texts, we will focus on the academic controversy about the appearance of script in India to illustrate the continuity between the Centre's past and present research. The date of the first known evidence of deciphered scripts noting Indian languages is fiercely debated — from the end of the 3rd millennium BC to the middle of the 3rd century BC. The discussions include the possible parts played by other cultural areas in the invention of scripts adapted to write Indian languages, the importance of orality and the hypothesis of a direct link between what is commonly called the Indus script and the Brāhmī script that spread throughout the whole of South and Southeast Asia where it gave birth to nearly 200 different scripts. But where did Brāhmī originate? In the north of India? Did Brāhmī first note a Dravidian or a North-Aryan language? Some of the most debated clues come from a site, Arikamedu, included in the territory of Pondicherry, explored by corresponding members of the EFEO from the beginning of the 20th century and a reference for methodology and dates in India itself but also in Southeast Asia.