Government of Tamilnadu, especially Dr Kalaignar Karunanidhi, the Chief Minister, had succeeded in persuading the wooden UPA Government to declare Tamil as a Classical Language in 2005. I understand that the Government of India have since sanctioned an amount of Rs 5 crore for the promotion of Classical Tamil and that an amount of Rs 3 crore has so far been spent by Tamilnadu Government towards this noble and worthy cause. I fully endorse the view of Dr Avvai Natarajan, former Secretary to Government of Tamilnadu (Tamil Culture and Tamil Development) and former Vice Chancellor of Tamil University, Thanjavur in this context: ‘While I congratulate the Government of Tamilnadu for having taken the initiative to declare the ancestral home of Parithimal Kalaignar near Pasumalai in Madurai as a Memorial, yet this initiative will come to full fruition only when the Government of Tamilnadu moves the Government of India to give total financial assistance to the tune of Rs100 crore to begin with to establish an Indian Institute of Classical Tamil in Chennai City and houses it in a building to be named as ‘PARITHIMAL KALAIGNAR BUILDING’. This new Institute should serve the cause of promotion of Classical Tamil and Classical Tamil Literature like the French Academy in France founded by Cardinal de Richelieu (1585-1642) in 1635”.
The French Academy consists of forty Members, known as immortels (Immortals). New Members are elected by the Members of the Academy itself. Academicians hold office for life, but they may be removed for misconduct. This Body has the task of acting as an official authority on the French Language. The French Academy is charged with publishing an official dictionary of the language. Its rulings, however, are only advisory; not binding on either the public or the government or the nation.
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G Subramania Iyer (1855-1915), the founder of the Hindu and Swadeshamitran, paid his tribute to Parithimal Kalaignar in these words in 1895: “Of the new band of graduates who have thus stepped into the field of literature, I am glad to mention as one of the most, if not the most conspicuous amongst them, the name of PANDIT V G SURYANARAYANA SASTRIAR of the Madras Christian College. Apart from the surviving generation of the old school of Pandits, Pandit U V Swaminatha Aiyar, for instance, I think I may say that V G Suryanaryana Sastriar is the foremost worker in the cause of the advancement of Tamil literature. He is still young and I hope it will be his distinction and fame to leave behind him enduring marks of the influence of his genius on the new era into which Tamil literature is struggling to enter”.
G Subramania Iyer was indeed prophetic in his appraisal of Parithimal Kalaignar who became one of the great pioneers and savants in the field of Tamil literature at the turn of the 20th century.
V G Suryanarayana Sastri (who assumed the pseudonym of
Parithimal Kalaignar, a literal translation of his Sanskrit name) was born on 6 July 1870 at
Vilacheri village near
Pasumalai in Madurai (Tamilnadu) to a devout Saivite Brahmin Govinda Sivan. He was put in school, to learn Sanskrit and Tamil when he was 10 years old. He learnt the Vedas under his father and Tamil under S Sabapathy Mudaliar who was teaching Tamil at the Madurai College. He was such a prodigy in learning that in a few years he learnt practically all that his teachers knew and his father was naturally anxious that he should learn English also.
Accordingly he was sent for his secondary school education and the first course in Arts in the Madurai College. Later, he went to Madras and joined the Christian College (Rev Dr Miller College as it was popularly known in those days) to study English, Philosophy and Tamil. He soon became a favourite pupil of the reputed Rev Dr Miller, Principal of that college and took his BA degree in 1893 obtaining the first rank in the college in Philosophy and Tamil. Rev Dr Miller wished to offer Sastri a Lecturerership in philosophy in his college. But the young man preferred a Tamil Pundit’s position, though the latter position carried a lower salary and status. But here was a graduate of the Madras University securing a university rank deliberately choosing the little coveted job of teaching Tamil to unwilling students. He was the first man in the history of this land to make such a choice. Parithimal Kalaignar taught to a handful of students, twelve (12) in number. He used to say that Chirst and Sankara had twelve disciples (12), leaving us to infer what he meant. Like the 9 Gems in the Royal Court of Chandragupta Vikramaditya, these 12 students of Parithimal Kalaignar became very eminent and famous in the field of education, literature and letters.
The twelve (12) were: N Balarama Iyer, V S Shanmugham Pillai, C N Saravan Mudaliar, S Ramaswami Iyengar, S Varadachari, S Sundarachari, Salasalochana Chettiar, J Vasudeva Pantulu, Pranatavtihara Sivan, Subrahmanya Achari, S Muthiah Mudaliar, K R Srinivasa Iyangar . K R Srinivasa Iyangar became one of the foremost Professors of English Literature in post-independent India.
Parithimal Kalaignar revolutionised the teaching of Tamil to such an extent that some of the best students in the college were attracted to the Tamil language and to the new teacher. The number of such boys grew till he formed the ‘TAMIL SCHOLARS GROUP’ around him and to them he taught unstintingly all that he had learnt from his teachers and for no consideration whatsoever. Thus he sacrificed a great deal in the cause of his mother tongue which was suffering from neglect and ignominy in those days. This act of self-sacrifice won for him the admiration and support of Rev Dr Miller.
The great Editor of Tamil classics C W Damodaram Pillai (1832-1901), hearing about Suryanarayana Sastri’s competence in Tamil, called and examined him, and and taking note of the genius of the young man presented to him a copy each of his edited works. He continued to be his friend and patron till the end.
Parithimal Kalaignar was appointed Head Tamil Pandit in the Madras Christian College in 1895. He was very unorthodox in his teaching methods and treated his pupils as co-adventurers in the cause of literary discoveries. He had no respect for tradition merely on the ground of its antiquity and he infused into his students the same spirit of heterodoxy and non-conformism within the bounds of literary decency. He wrote poetry, prose, drama, and he authored a standard work on Tamil dramaturgy called NATAKAVIYAL.
He wrote the first sonnet in Tamil and called it Tanippasuram. Some of them were immediately translated into English by Dr G U Pope (1820-1908) of Oxford University. Dr Pope hailed Sastri ‘as the herald of a new school heartily to be welcomed’.
As years passed, his range of literary activities grew wider and wider. He became the Editor of a Journal called Gnanabodhini and edited it till his death. M S Purnalingam Pillai (1866-1947) who wrote the first History of Tamil Literature in English and dedicated it to Parithimal Kalaignar in touching verse in English. When Parithimal Kalaignar died in 1903, M S Purnalingam Pillai paid this tribute to him: “.”During the 10 years after his graduation in 1892, not a moment passed without my seeing Parithimal Kalaignar do something or other to develop or diffuse Classical Tamil Language and Literature. His enthusiasm for Tamil knew no bound.”
Sastri boldly wrote the first tragic drama
Mana Vijayam in Tamil and caused a great shock to the orthodox conservatives in the Tamil literary world. His incessant activity started telling on his health. He had contracted tuberculosis. He fought valiantly against the disease but finally succumbed to it, on the 2 November 1903, at the age of 33. His grief-stricken father renounced the world. His young widow and daughter and two sons, all practically infants, came under the sheltering care of her parents. Indeed the world of Tamil literature had seen a great meteor rise and pass, leaving an incredible and unmatched career as a splendid memory in the glorious history of Tamil Language and Literature.
Introducing two Tamil sonnets by Parithimal Kalaignar, one on ‘Thiruvalluvar’ and the other on ‘War’, F W Kellett, the Editor of the Christian College magazine, in the issue dated July 1901 wrote as follows:-
“A time comes in the history of a language when there are set before it the ways of life and death. If it cannot burst the bands which enfold it, it dies. If it can find freedom of movement and expression it lives. It is generally agreed that as a literary language, Tamil is now at this critical stage. The danger to its life is increased by the presence side by side with it of that mighty rival, English.”
“But apart from that competition, literary Tamil in itself has the seeds of the disease which may prove mortal unless it is checked. Pedantry, conventionalism, artificiality and imitativeness are among these seeds of decay. The remedy is a return to natural simplicity.”
“Many can speak Tamil with power and grace, who when they take pen in hand are the slaves of arbitrary standards of composition. Happily there are some in whom nature and true literary instinct and inspiration have begun to work, forcing them to seek deliverance from narrowing and cramping canons of art and to express themselves in modern forms, in natural tones and in a language understood by the common people. Parithimal Kalaignar is the leading harbinger of this new movement in the field of Tamil literature”.
More than a century has passed since Parithimal Kalagnar’s death. Whatever be the final judgment of history, no one can ever dispute the fact that he was indeed a colossal Columbus in the virgin ground of promotion of Classical Tamil Language and Literature in the last decade of the 19th century.
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