George L. Hart

George Luzerne Hart, III (born c. 1945) is a professor of Tamil language at the University of California, Berkeley. His work focuses on the classical Tamil literature and on identifying the relationships between the Tamil and Sanskrit literature. In 2015 the Government of India awarded him the title of Padma Shri, the third highest civilian honour.

Hart received his PhD in Sanskrit from Harvard University in 1971. He has also studied Latin and Greek as well as several modern European and Indian languages. He taught Sanskrit at the University of Wisconsin–Madison before joining the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he founded the Tamil Department.

Hart is best known for his translations of several Tamil epics into English and for his argument that Tamil is a classical language, a status that the Government of India formally accorded it on 18 September 2004.

Hart is also the author of several Tamil and Sanskrit textbooks.

He is married to Kausalya Hart, who is also a professor and Tamil textbook author.

Hart's Poems of Ancient Tamil offers a comparative analysis of ancient Tamil poetry (Sangam literature) with reference to the classical Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit and Prakrit) literature. It sets forth a "very convincing argument" that the themes of southern poets were assimilated into the Prakrit and classical Sanskrit poetry, such as Gaha Sattasai and the poetry of Kalidasa. However, there was little influence of the northern literary expression on the Tamil literature. To substantiate this thesis, Hart provides a thorough analysis of the antecedents of the ancient Tamil poetry and its cultural milieu, which focused on controlling sacred power among various social classes, and its reflection in the later literate poetry. Hart points out that the Indo-Aryan poetry, in its borrowing of the Tamil literary elements, lacked the subtlety and sophistication of its Tamil counterparts. Reviewer Lucetta Mowry finds it to be the "beginning of a valuable and important study" of the relation between the two Indic traditions.

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