Children Marek Zvelebil Died January 17, 2009, France | Name Kamil Zvelebil | |
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Institutions Oriental Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech RepublicUniversity of ChicagoUniversity of HeidelbergCharles UniversityCollege de FranceUniversity of LeidenUniversity of Utrecht Books The smile of Murugan on Tamil literature of South India | ||
Kamil Zvelebil | Wikipedia audio article
Kamil Václav Zvelebil (September 17, 1927 – January 17, 2009) was a distinguished Czech scholar in Indian literature and linguistics, notably Tamil, Sanskrit, Dravidian linguistics and literature and philology.
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Life and career
Zvelebil studied at the Charles University in Prague from 1946 to 1952 where he majored in Indology, English language, literature and philosophy. After obtaining his Ph.D in 1952 and until 1970 he was a senior research fellow in Tamil and Dravidian linguistics and literature at the Oriental Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. He held the role of associate professor of Tamil and Dravidian at Charles University in Prague until 1968, when he and his family were forced to flee after the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia.
During the late 1960s, he made many field trips including those to South India. From 1965 to 1966, he was a temporary professor in Dravidian studies at the University of Chicago in the United States and was a visiting professor at Heidelberg University between 1967 and 1968.
In 1970, after more time at the University of Chicago, he was a visiting professor at the Collège de France in Paris. After more travel through European universities he became the professor of Dravidian linguistics and South Indian literature and culture at Utrecht University until his retirement in 1992.
Books
He has authored numerous books and articles on Dravidian linguistics and literature. Some of them are: