Award to Prof. Jaroslav Vacek for his work in the field of Tamil Studies
At a celebratory meeting including a cultural programme on December 22, 2012, the Association Culturelle des Tamouls at Vauréal, Paris, France, handed over to Prof. Jaroslav Vacek the Aruntamil Award (Aruntamil Virutu) in appreciation of his internationally acknowledged work in Tamil Studies, especially in classical Tamil literature.
Prof. Vacek graduated in Sanskrit and Tamil (1965) and at present he is the Director of the Institute of South and Central Asia, Faculty of Philosophy, Charles University. In 1976 he founded the teaching of Mongolian at Charles University after he had spent almost a year studying Mongolian in Ulaanbaatar. After 1990 Prof. Vacek contributed to the re-opening of the subjects of Sanskrit, Tamil and also Bengali at Charles University, the teaching of which had been interrupted in the 1970s and 1980s.
The research work of J. Vacek concerns particularly the Indian linguistic area and the literary and philological interpretation of classical Tamil literature, the Sangam literature. In the early 1970s he started to work on an Old Tamil Reader with Prof. D. Thiyagarajan from Madurai. After her tragic passing away in February 1975 in Prague, he finished the work in co-operation with Dr. S.V. Subramanian, Director of the International Institute of Tamil Studies, Madras.
Besides that, starting from the middle of the 1970s, he has been systematically working on the comparison of Dravidian languages with Altaic languages (among them Mongolian). He is an author of a series of textbooks and also of a number of books and research papers in the field of Indian languages and Mongolian, partly in the form of international co-operation (see Bibliography of the Institute). In addition to that, he has also translated from Sanskrit and Tamil. Furthermore, he has been working as editor-in-chief of the two internationally reviewed journals Pandanus and Mongolo-Tibetica Pragensia.
Prof. Vacek was mentor and supervisor to a number of specialists in Indology, both Tamil and Sanskrit, who now continue the study of important aspects of these specialised areas of Indology.
