Kindred Spirits

An unlikely friendship links the Volga and the Vaigai / Communities

- Kalpana Karunakaran

On 19 November 2020, the Indian embassy in Russia announced that Alexander Dubiansky, a professor of Tamil studies at Moscow State University, had died of COVID-19 at the age of 79. Dubiansky was a reputed scholar of the Tamil language and its literature, and the news of his death led to an outpouring of grief through social media posts by writers, scholars and leaders across the political spectrum in Tamil Nadu. He was remembered as “an adopted son of Mother Tamil,” whose devotion to the language had “linked the Volga and the Vaigai rivers.”

Dubiansky’s scholarship contributed to, and was in turn shaped by, a rich exchange of ideas between Tamil and Russian writers, readers and scholars. D Ravikumar, a Tamil author and member of the Lok Sabha, wrote an extended obituar note for the journal Manarkeni, in which he placed Dubiansky’s work in the context of the shared scholarship that evolved through cross-cultural exchanges between India and the Soviet Union. The fall of the Soviet Union, which had actively promoted the study of Indian languages, precipitated a collapse of the institutions that had buttressed this relationship. As state patronage waned in Russia during the 1990s, individual researchers such as Dubiansky took on the mantle of preserving and reviving the ties forged by the two nations and their literary cultures.