17  Origins Of Modern Tamil Prose. The Historical And The Theoretical Problem

The problem of the origin of modern Tamil prose- -as seen from a necessarily simplified perspective-is a twofold one: first, purely historical; and second, theoretical.

The first part of the problem means to trace down and find out, to list, analyze, classify and explain the external causes and conditions accelerating or mitigating the origins and development of modern prose. The second part of the problem means to answer a basic theoretical question: is prose, as belletristic writing, as a form of creative literature, basically alien to Tamil (and Indian) culture, and could and did it arise and develop only under predominant foreign impact—or not?

I shall not at all attempt to answer these questions, to solve these problems. There are unfortunately almost no valid Vorarbeiten in this field, and only very recently Tamil scholars themselves have begun to search for answers to these questions.¹

¹ The two books in Tamil that probably deserve to be mentioned in this connection are K. Kailasapathy’s Tamil nāval (“Tamil Novel”), Pāri Nilaiyam, Madras, 1968, and Mu. Vai. Aravintan’s uraiyāciriyarkaḷ (“The Commentators”), Madras, 1968.

In this chapter I shall try to arrange some facts reflecting the external and internal factors pertaining to the origins of modern Tamil prose, especially as far as printing and journalism in 19th Century Tamilnad is concerned.

Among the external historical factors we have to distinguish purely historical and political factors, external cultural factors, and external ideological factors.

The expansion of French and British rule from the coastal cities of Calcutta, Bombay, Madras etc., ultimately brought a kind of peace and order after decades of disorder, fighting and strife. It also brought new system of law, it codified indigenous law, it brought opportunity for new jobs etc., and there is no wonder that Indian intellectuals in general welcomed the new Pax Britannica. The introduction of the then modern science, of the Western conception of humanistic studies, of ideas of “enlightenment” etc. played an enormous role in the development of indigenous cultures. On the other hand, we must not forget the immense influence which the work of early Western Indologists had on the intellectual élite of India their editions and translations of ancient Indian texts were often a kind of revelation to the Indians themselves. They brought them better knowledge of their own cultural traditions; and the praise and admiration shown by Westerners aroused in Indians legitimate pride in their own heritage.

The most important of the external ideological factors was—in the 18th and early 19th Centuries—the confrontation with Christianity. Especially in the South of India there was massive missionary activity, both Catholic and Protestant. This confrontation meant, on the one hand, practical acceptance of parts of Christian doctrine and ethics,² but, at the same time, strong defence and resistance against it. The Hindus saw a model which they could adopt for methods and techniques of their own propaganda and education.

² We have in Tamil such early Christian poets as Henry Albert Krishna Pillai (1827-1900), whose Christian hymns are formally based on the Tēvāram.

³ The early British administrators, missionaries etc. were much impressed by Tamil culture. W. Taylor: “(Tamil) is one of the most copious, refined and polished languages spoken by man” (quoted by G. E. Gover, The FolkSongs of Southern India, Madras, 1871, viii-ix). P. Percival: “Perhaps no language combines greater force with equal brevity; and it may be asserted that no human speech is more close and philosophic in its expression as an exponent of the mind” (quoted ib.). E. Hoole: “God ‘left not Himself without witness’ among the Tamil people. . . The acquisition of the language in which the remains of Tamil wisdom are preserved is no easy task. Aptitude, genius, industry, perseverance, are necessary to the Tamil scholar” (E. J. Robinson, Tamil Wisdom, With an Introduction by the late Rev. Elijah Hoole, London, 1873, ix-x).

More specifically, in Tamil India (as elsewhere, e.g. in Bengal), there was great need felt by the British administrators to learn the “vernacular”. The old Portuguese and Latin grammars were inaccessible, dated or incomprehensible, and indigenous grammars ―anyhow not available yet in print-would be of no use for the beginners. So the first “modern” grammars of Tamil began to appear, written partly in Tamil prose, partly in English. Probably the first of these printed grammars for wider use was A Tamel Expositor by Teroovorcaudoo Subroya Mudaliar, printed at Madras A.D. 1811.³ In 1812, the College of Fort St. George was founded in Madras. In this institution (closed on July 21, 1854), Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and Urdu were taught by indigenous teachers, the munshis. First principals of this College were Englishmen, Ellis and Mackenzie, but later they also included Indians, like Muttusami Pillai, and this College was in fact the first centre of Westernoriented Tamil scholarship. The first influential Tamil scholars of the first half of the 19th Cent. all taught or were in some way connected with the College: Tandavaraya Mudaliyar, Muttusami Pillai and others.

Another important institution where the contacts of Western and Tamil culture took place daily was the office of the dubashis, the interpreters.

Among early French and British administrators, the need soon arose for various lists, inventories, catalogues, registers, accounts, chronicles etc., in Tamil, besides having them in French or English.

All these and similar factors had a definite trigger-effect accelerating the development of Tamil prose, adequate for such purposes.

As far as the classical and medieval Tamil texts were concerned, there was relative ignorance of them among the people. Only the traditional scholar, sometimes in private, sometimes in mutts, kept the knowledge alive. One of the reasons for this relative ignorance was the fact that all literary works were either in the manuscript form, or existing only in scholarly oral transmission, neither of these traditional channels accessible to the majority of common people. There were no really live centres of literary and cultural activities. For a few centuries, owing to political and religious reasons, Sanskrit, Urdu, Marathi and Telugu seem to have been more prestigious and important than Tamil even in Tamilnad. This is no speculation. We actually have records and accounts of the fact that Tamil as a literary language was neglected, while the other languages were decidedly preferred: cf. the complaints of Paṭikkācu Pulavar, a bard of the 17th Cent., who made himself acquainted with this deplorable state of affairs during his wanderings all over the country.

In the monasteries or mutts, it was a scholastic, highflown type of compositions which were produced, under a very strong impact of Sanskrit; in the 18th Cent., one may observe slight beginnings of a reaction against the over-all Sanskritization upheld by such overbearing Sanskrit enthusiasts as Swaminatha Desikar.

One important factor in the origin of modern prose seems to be the fact that traditional forms of literary expression became inadequate to express new ideas and new emotions, but, above all, to meet new demands and new needs, in fact, to express the entire process of the confrontation of the two cultures.

However, the most important external factors, playing an almost all-decisive part in the origin of modern and popular prose in Tamilnad and in India, were printing and journalism.

The very beginnings of printing, sporadic both in time, space and output, were all connected with missionary activities. Here was the origin of Gonzalves’ Kiristuvavaṇakkam (1577),⁴ one of the first if not the first book printed in India, Philip de Melho’s Tamil New Testament printed in 1749 etc. The two most important early printing establishments in the South were founded at Ambalakkadu (since 1679) and in Tranquebar (1712-13). However, it was only the massive spread of printing, beginning in Tamil India roughly after 1835, which played such a decisive role in the origin and development of modern prose.

⁴ According to Albertine Gaur of the British Museum, the first Tamil printed book was a translation of Francis Xavier’s Doutrina Christe by Henrique Henriques, published in 1578 in Goa, cf. “European Missionaries and the Study of Dravidian Languages”, Proceed. of the I Intern. Conference Seminar of Tamil Studies, Vol. II, Kuala Lumpur, 1969, pp. 322-328.

On August 3rd, 1835, a law was passed which abolished the previous acts of 1823, 1825 and 1827 concerning printing and publishing of books. Printing was brought under direct surveillance of magistrates and thus a kind of censorship was established (disobeying the law resulted in a fine of Rs 5000 and/or 2 years’ imprisonment); on the other hand, this law institutionalized and legalized printing, and it gave an exactly defined obligatory form to everything which was to be published. The full text of the new law which formed article 11 of the 1835 Act was published in Fort St George Gazette in English, Tamil, and the other languages of Madras.

What was, however, most important was the fact that the law enabled Indians to own pressworks. Previously, almost all printing works were owned by Catholic and Protestant missions, and, apart from dictionaries, grammars and textbooks, they naturally printed their own kind of Christian propaganda material to the exclusion of everything else.

The fact that since 1835 Indian ownership of printing establishments was legalized had naturally a tremendous impact, and the results were to be seen very soon: first, old Tamil texts began to be published and this rediscovery of ancient Tamil culture ultimately led to the “Tamil Renaissance”; second, the development of modern prose took a new and vigorously different turn.

It was of course a great novelty to have old venerated texts which had so far been known only to the elite either through oral transmission from guru to chela, or written on palm-leaves which were almost unavailable, printed and published in a great number of copies which were cheap and easy to obtain. It was such a novelty that many of the pandits who called this manner of treating old literary texts elutā eļuttu, i.e. “unwritten script”, actually opposed it. One of the points which made tremendous difference between a palm-leaf manuscript copy of a text and its printed edition was the price. Thus e.g. according to John Murdoch, the Rev. P. Percival paid (sometime before 1835) for a palm-leaf manuscript-copy of Beschi’s Caturakarāti 10 English pounds; when the same work was printed after 1835, its price fell down to 2½ shillings.

The “rediscovery” of ancient Tamil literature occurred in the transition period of the later 19th Century when-to use the happy phrase of A. K. Ramanujan—“both paper and palm leaf were used”. The man most responsible for making possible the transition was U. V. Swaminatha Aiyar (1855-1942), by editing and printing the most important and inaccessible of ancient manuscripts. The late medieval Saivite and Vaiṣṇavite scholars “apparently tabooed as irreligious all secular texts which included the earliest and the greatest of Tamil literary texts; they disallowed from study all Jain and Buddhist texts … Under this intellectual taboo, a great scholar like Camiṇātaiyar had to give his nights and days to secondrate religious and grammatical texts of the medieval period. He was entirely unaware even of the existence of the twin epics and the breath-taking poetic anthologies of Tamil literature, till he met a liberal-minded munsif named Rāmacuvāmi Mutaliār. He records the date as 1880, October 21, a Thursday- and all students of Tamil literature should think of that date as ‘etched in red letters’”.⁵

⁵ A. K. Ramanujan, Language and “Modernization”: The Tamil Example, University of Chicago, 1968. Xeroxed, Private Distribution Only. By courtesy of the author.

⁶ U. V. Swaminatha Aiyar’s Autobiography (in Tamil), ed. 1958, 326-43.

It was munsif Ramaswamy who made Swaminatha Aiyar aware of the existence of such texts as the Cīvakacintāmaṇi and the Cilappatikāram, and even gave him a handwritten manuscript to take home and read.⁶ Swaminatha Aiyar devoted then the rest of his life to unearthing, editing and printing ancient Tamil literary texts.

However, it seems that we should go at least twenty years back for the true ‘rediscoverer’ of ancient Tamil literature. In 1868, Rev. H. Bower, an Englishman, published the first book of Cīvakacintāmaṇi (Nāmakaļ Ilampakam): The Chintamani. First Book Called Namagal Ilambagam; with the Commentary of Nachinarkiniyar, and with analysis and notes in English, Tamil and English Indexes, and an English Introduction explaining the Jaina system on which the book is based; by Rev. H. Bower, with the assistance of E. Muttaiya Pillai. Printed by H. W. Laurie, at the Christian Knowledge Society Press, No. 18, Church Street, Vepery, 1868. Bower’s edition was of a surprisingly high standard.⁷

⁷ Cf. S. Vaiyapuri Pillai, Tamiḻc cutar maṇikaḷ, 3rd ed. 1959, 296.

Without trying in any way to detract from the great merits due to U. V. Swaminatha Aiyar, we have to justly admit that S. V. Damodaram Pillai (1823-1901) deserves equal admiration and gratitude for his editions of literary (e.g. Kalittokai, 1887) and especially grammatical texts (e.g. Viracōliyam, 1881, Iṟaiyaṉār’s Akapporuḷ, 1883, Tolkāppiyam Poruḷ., 1885). It was probably Damodaram Pillai more than anyone else who started the search after old manuscripts. Without doubt he was the one who was first engaged in the rediscovery of the earliest classical literature. Before him, probably nobody knew for sure about the existence of an anthology called Eṭṭuttokai; pandits were not sure even of the famous epic, whether it was Cilappati kāram or Ciṟappatikāram. And worse than that: there were even doubts and suspicions as to the genuine nature and authenticity of the ancient texts, so much so that Damodaram Pillai had to write in a kind of self-defence: “Śrīmat Căminātaiyar is my witness, as I am a witness to him”. Perseverance and modesty were the two most characteristic features of this man, who was as great as Swaminatha Aiyar, but whose greatness and merits have never been truly acknowledged.

It is impossible to give a chronological or a complete list of printing works which published Tamil literature in the first half of the 19th Cent. But after 1835, there was an enormous growth of Indian-owned printing establishments in Madras and in Ceylon, and foreign printers and the missions, too, began publishing Tamil literature. According to preliminary and incomplete data, in the first half of the 19th Cent., roughly until 1860, there were seventy printers in Madras and in Ceylon, publishing in Tamil.

The appearance of printing and paper, the availability of printing to Tamil editors, scholars and original authors after 1835, revolutionalized the whole conception, the ways, methods and techniques of writing, and was no doubt one of the two most decisive external factors in the development of modern prose.

The second factor of utmost importance was the birth and growth of Tamil journalism. The 19th Century is the century of Tamil journalism.

At the beginning of the century, it were mission-owned and government establishments that began publishing Tamil weeklies and monthlies. The first, and at the same time typical of these Christian-oriented Tamil journals was Tamilppattirikai (alias Tamilital), established in 1831, a monthly, published by the Madras Religious Tract Society.

In 1840, a Christian-oriented journal for children was started in Nagarcoil, a quarterly under the name Pālatīpikai (stopped publishing in 1852). In the same year, three other Tamil journals were founded in Madras: Missionary Glance in Nagarcoil, Friendly Instructor in Palamcottah, and Tarpōtakam in the same place.

About six or more weeklies to monthlies to quarterlies were started between 1840-1855; in 1855, a very important weekly, the Tinavarttamani, appeared for the first time. It was published every Friday, and its founder and editor was Rev. P. Percival. Though Christian in orientation, this was the first full-blooded Tamil journal in its language, and in general atmosphere. It published news, pieces of ancient literature(!), science, essays. It was supported with 200 Rs of government money per month. After Percival left, the editorship was taken over by Damodaram Pillai and later by Viswanatha Pillai.

The first period of Tamil journalism, typical for its Christian, missionary orientation,⁸ and for the absence of dailies, came to an end after 1880 with the foundation of Cutecamittiran (Swadeshamitran), the excellent and well-known daily paper of Madras, which, by its political outlook, language and cultural orientation set up an entirely different and much higher standard for Tamil journalism.

⁸ An exception was the Tattuvapōtini, founded in St Thome, Mylapore, in 1864 by the Madras Brahma Samaj, followed by Vivēkavilakkam, another journal of the Samaj, in 1865.

Between 1831-1880, that is in about fifty years, roughly 46 weeklies, monthlies and quarterlies were founded in Madras Presidency. Between 1880-1900, that is within twenty years alone, approximately 60 Tamil dailies to quarterlies were born. This number is rather impressive in itself. And starting with Cutēcami- ttiran, there was place, in Tamil journalism, for regular newsediting, for political and social satire, for regular essays, and, most important of all, for the short story. Typical for the new type of periodical, devoted more to literature and culture than anything else was the monthly Ňānapōtini, published since 1897 in Madras by M. S. Purnalingam Pillai, the author of the first history of Tamil literature. The joint editor of this—for its time quite outstandingachievement was Suryanarayana Sastri (1871-1903), a noted poet, dramatist, journalist and scholar.

For any successful attack on the theoretical problem posed above the origin and evolution of modern Tamil prose as suchwe have to make a distinction between belletristic writing (prosefiction) and all other types of prose; second, between direct influence and an accelerating impulse, a trigger-like effect.

Well-spread in time, for about seven to eight centuries, there had been a tremendous potential of Tamil prose in the writings of the commentators: from the alliterative, highly ornamental prose of a Nakkīrar to a comparatively simple descriptive style of Aṭiyārkkunallar; there were short pieces of narrative prose as well as heavy, ornate and very learned passages of some commentaries. These sources were of course accessible only to a few individuals: traditional pandits, antiquarians, foreign scholars. But it is exactly these men who stand at the craddle of modern prose. Foreigners like Roberto de Nobili and C. J. Beschi, traditional scholars like Minakshisundaram Pillai (1815-1876).

Mināṭcicuntaram Pillai was an extremely prolific poet and translator from Sanskrit, but his poetry⁹ is now almost forgotten. His enormous importance lies in the fact that he gathered round himself a charmed circle of disciples-in the manner of a Samuel Johnson and some of the most distinguished scholars and prosewriters of Tamilnad owned their skill, enthusiasm and knowledge to this fascinating man—the most noted among them perhaps Thyagaraja Chettiar and U. V. Swaminatha Aiyar.

⁹ 22 purāṇas, 10 pillaittamils, 11 antātis, 2 kalampakams, 7 mālais, 3 kovais, 9 ulās and 1 līlai.

¹⁰ A current saying about him was vaitālum valuvinṛi vaivārē, “Even in abuse he would speek faultlessly”. Once, so the story goes, he went to the bazaar to buy some coconuts and asked about the price in the following manner: “Ammaiye, nīvir tenkankāykaļai māral ennaṇamo?” Unfortunately this can be appreciated only by those who know at least some Tamil.

For prose writing as such, however, a more important personality was Āṟumuka Nāvalar (1822-1876) of Jaffna. The incentive for his literary activities seems to have been the religious zeal of Christian missionaries which provoked him to an attitude of fierce defence. Soon a stream of powerful Tamil prose gushed out of him, prose which was expressive, vigorous, and tolerably free of Sanskrit influence though somewhat pedantic and dry. He established his own press in Jaffna and the books which he published—though containing perhaps childishly controversial matters-actually meant the origin of modern Tamil prose-style. His prose is very severe, spotlessly correct and very polished.¹⁰ He composed a Saiva catechism, Caivavināviṭai, formally based on current Roman Catholic catechisms. He was also the teacher of Percival, whom he actively helped with his translation of the Bible into Tamil. For the development of Tamil belletristic writing most important of his contribution is probably his very readable rendering of the Periyapuraṇam into prose.

Apart from these men, and a host of others who were their contemporaries and their successors, and who were nourished basically by two sources, by the medieval commentators and by early Christian missionary writings, there is yet another line of development of modern Tamil prose, entirely independent of the learned scholarly tradition.

This third line consists of prose which is a direct, simple and charmingly naive reflection of the spoken language of the 18th Century.

Anadarangam Pillai was born at Pirambūr near Madras in April 1709. His father’s brother-in-law, Nainiyappa Pillai, was a distinguished citizen of Pondichéry, a wealthy merchant and a government official in the French colony. He invited Tiruvengada Pillai, the father of Anandarangam, to become his partner in business. The newcomer did very well, indeed so well that he became divan of Pondichéry. When he died, the divanship was for a short time in the hands of a Kanagaraya Mudaliar, and when this man died, the French East India Company transferred the office on Anandarangam Pillai.

Under governor Joseph François Dupleix, Anandarangam acted as the Prime Minister of the French colony. He invested his money well in textile industries, printing, and merchandise of different sort; he even owned a big ship by name of Anandappuravi which carried his merchandise from European to Chinese ports. He was also a patron of literature, and we have at least three panegyric poems composed about him; one of these poems says that poets were awaiting him as peacocks await the coming of rain-clouds, as the cakravāka birds await the appearance of the moon, as the lotus awaits the rising of the sun. He was liberal not only to poets but also to temples, and founded a number of caravanserais and choultries. In 1760 the British invaded Pondichéry. Four days before this French-British war was over, on January 11, 1761, Anandarangam died.

He left behind a diary which he began writing on September 6, 1736, under the governorship of Dupleix, as the divan of Pondichery and the governor’s dubashi, interpreter. It is one of the most important documents ever written in the Tamil language: from state secrets to small everyday trivia of family life, Anandarangam Pillai has captured, sometimes in details, sometimes in an almost shorthand style, the events of 25 years. Whatever he saw and heard, without adding much of his own imagination, but very lively, and obviously very truthfully: the joys and sorrows of his own household, echoes of battles and policies in India and Europe, appointments and withdrawals of French officials, goings and comings of ships, festivals and ceremonies in temples and churches-it is as if one would watch a documentary movie showing the life of French Tamilnad in the middle of the 18th Century day by day.

As a historical source it is a fascinating mine of both trivial and important data. As a piece of prose it makes sometimes charming, sometimes boring reading. Some entries have dry, factological character:

“29th of April, 1745:
A ship from China by name of Notre Dame de Sours. The captain’s name is M. Felicien de Sylva Medeiro. The ship brought sugar, groundnuts, candy, and other Chinese products. On the same day, a ship by name of Lakshmana Prasad arrived from Tennasserim, bringing 13 elephants; the ship-master is Subha Singh”.

“5th of June, 1743:
Today at four o’clock, they hanged, opposite the choultry, a thief who was caught thieving in the house of a muslim in Miraveli”.

“3rd of Febr., 1743:
In the morning at 10 o’clock a ship named Duc d’Orleans departed for Europe. It carries bundles of washing sarees, one bunch of indigo silk sarees, many sacks of ground nut, of kindan, of cotton cloth etc. M. Coulard also went to Europe aboard this ship”.

But some of the entries read very well.

“16th of Oct., 1745:
Today in the evening, the Christians with their wives-the Pariahs,  Indians dressed in European garments, Whites and Tamils—all gathered at the place where they usually come to hear their pūjā. K. R. Mudaliyar’s son Asarappa Mudaliar with his wife Selvam also came to the place where their religious ceremonies are held. The woman was all dressed in the garments of their caste; she was heavily perfumed with many odours and aromas; she had on a transparent muslin saree. When she approached the honourable padre who was very near to the Swami, and as she was kneeling deep in thought on the place where one hears the Christian pūjā, as soon as that cloud of perfumes hit the nose of the padre, he discarded the holy words and catching his nose he pricked her hair-knot with a rattan cane and shouted: ’Are you a married woman? Or are you a whore? Isn’t your husband ashamed of you? To come to church with this muslin saree on-one can see your whole body, your breasts, and even your hairy orifice! Get up and home with you, you virtuous one, your mass is ended!”

All this is written in the most deliciously colloquial language with a number of spelling errors which would offend any purist and perfectionist; spontaneous, with a keen sense of minute observation, here and there with a pinch of humour. A complete and good translation of this book is badly needed.

Anandarangam Pillai’s Diary is entirely independent of the traditional line of high Tamil prose, and it has most probably nothing to do either with any direct impetus from French of English literature. It seems that the only classical work of Tamil literature the divan knew was the Tirukkuṟaḷ. Naturally, he knew many languages: besides Tamil, he knew Telugu, Urdu and French, perhaps even English. But it seems that this knowledge was not at all academic, but practical, day-to-day knowledge, and it is almost certain that he did not know any of the literatures. His Diary is a direct and spontaneous piece of prose-writing which had only one model: life itself. And so is its language: the written form of the day-to-day spoken Tamil of the 18th Century.

The reader was warned that an answer to the question pertaining to the origin of modern Tamil belletristic prose would not be attempted. A few suggestions will nevertheless be made in conclusion of this chapter. As already stressed, potentially, Tamil prose has always been present in Tamil literature. Since Tamil literature starts with bardic creations, its first fruits were in form of poetry. All the world over bards sang songs, i.e. composed poetry. But, at the same time, the syntax and the lexis of ordinary prose was developed in inscriptions. Even the Tolkāppiyam speaks of prose literature consisting of riddles and proverbs (s. 1429). Short narrative prose passages occurred in the Cilappatikāram.¹¹ Narrative introductions to bardic songs were also in prose.¹² Later, there is some Sanskritized prose in Peruntēvaṇār’s Pāratam (9th Cent.). And, finally, we come to a large, lengthy literary work in Tamil prose, the Śrīpurāṇam of Maṇṭalapuruṭar (prob. 16th Cent.), a purana of the sixty-three Jaina saints. All these facts show that there had always been in Tamil literature a perfectly adequate capacity to develop prose-writing, that there had always been a kind of accumulator of different prose-styles, narrative, descriptive, factographic and eruditory, which could generate prose if need arose.

¹¹ E.g. the uraiperu kaṭṭurai is a piece of narrative prose. Another genuine piece of prose-fiction contained in the epic is the uraippaṭṭumaṭai at the beginning of Canto 29; in Daniélou’s Engl. translation this part is found on pp. 187-189 (the syntax of this particular piece of prose is indeed awkward and cumbersome; the whole paragraph contains only one finite verb-form and an endless number of adverbial participles and infinitives).

¹² E.g. the colophon to Puṟam 5.

¹³ D. Zbavitel, “The European impact and the chief changes in the function of literature in Asia”, in The East Under Western Impact (Academia, Prague, 1967), 94-100.

¹⁴ Usually, C. J. Beschi’s Paramārtta kuruvin katai is quoted as the first work of modern Tamil prose-fiction. Constanzo Gioseffo Eusebio Beschi was born in Castiglione nelle Striviere (Venezia) on Nov. 8, 1680. In 1707 he landed in Portuguese India as a member of the Society of Jesus, armed with the knowledge of Italian, Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, French and Persian. Soon he acquired a working knowledge of Urdu, Telugu and Sanskrit. Tamil, however, became his great love. Until his death at Ambalakkadu on Febr. 4, 1747, he wrote a number of grammars, dictionaries, a great and very excellent epic poem, and a small satire in prose mentioned above. The English translation appeared in London, 1822: The Adventures of Gooroo Paramartan. A tale in the Tamil language: accompanied by a translation and vocabulary, together with an analysis of the first story. By Benjamin Babington.

¹⁵ D. Zbavitel, op. cit.

The decisive impetus came with the tremendous impact of Europe upon India which should not be underestimated (or even rejected!). However, European influences were “more immediately effective in the social sphere” and “much less formative in the actual birth” of modern prose-fiction.¹³ If need arose, prose could be written easily-witness the eloquence of Anandarangam Pillai’s Diary which is, truly enough, predominantly documentary, facto1 graphic writing but which also contains elements of narrative prose and description in its anecdotic passages (and, what is also important, we do not know for sure that his is the only written document of that type; rather, we may hope that one day more of such “diaries” and similar documentary writings will be unearthed). When one reads, therefore, that modern Tamil prose-fiction¹⁴ arose and developed under decisive Western, European influence (and sometimes this implies that without such influence it would have never developed at all), one should bear in mind that this “influence” should be rather understood more generally and broadly as an “impact”, for it was a diverse, far-reaching and long-term effect¹⁵ rather than individual, direct and absolutely decisive influence. On the other hand, it is significant, that–at least as far as we know at this stage of our knowledge—the strong “mainstream” out of which almost all if indeed not all modern Tamil prose developed was the one strong current of scholarly, commentary-like, severe, somewhat dry and pedantic prose of the savant, of the scholiast, of the pundit and sage. This fact has very decisively left an imprint on almost everything written afterwards.