Les écoles et l’alphabet des Tamouls : manuscrit de Philippe Van der Haeghen (1874), édité et annoté

Vielle, Christophe [UCL] Francis, Emmanuel [UCL]

This historiographic article deals with the beginnings of Indology in Belgium in the 19th century. Starting with the figure of Félix Nève (1816-1893), founder of the first course of Sanskrit in a Belgian University (Louvain, 1841) and who himself considered as his precursor the less known figure of Eugène Jacquet (1811-1838), the paper in its main part concerns the intellectual life and the works of a forgotten, less ‘academic’ but nevertheless interesting, independent scholar, viz. Philippe Van der Haeghen (1825-1886), from Brussels. His various writings, of which a complete bibliography is set up, reveal a prolific polygraph, historian and philologist, and a Catholic polemist. As an Indologist, he deserves to be mentioned for his two essays (1855 and 1858) in Tamil studies. A third linguistic writing in the field, dealing with the indigenous traditional teaching of the Tamil language, and the presentation of the Tamil alphabet illustrated by Tamil words (given in Tamil script) compared with their Sanskrit cognates (in Devanâgarî script), was submitted at the Belgian Academy in 1874, but it was not accepted for publication by Nève (relying in his report on rather fallacious arguments). The present article is the annotated critical edition of this unpublished manuscript.