- Lived:
- 19 February 1855 – 28 April 1942 · born into a poor family of Uthamadhanapuram village in the Kaveri delta → Kumbakonam, then Madras (Chennai), with fifty years of manuscript-hunting tours through the villages of the Tamil country in between
- Field:
- philology and editing — the recovery, collation and printing of classical Tamil literature from dying palm-leaf manuscripts
- The Big Idea:
- By 1880 the ancient classics of Tamil — one of the oldest living literatures on earth — survived only as rotting palm-leaf bundles in private houses, unread and unreadable. One man spent the rest of his life finding them, deciphering them, and printing them, and handed Tamils back two thousand years of their own literature.
- In their words:
- Asked in 1880 what he had studied, he listed his learning with pride — and realized, as the memoir tells it, that not one ancient classic was on the list. "I felt ashamed of my learning." (En Charitram; the rendering follows the memoir's account)
- If you remember one thing:
- The Sangam poems, the Cilappatikāram, the Thirukkuṟaḷ's whole ancient world — the literature five earlier chapters of this book have lived inside — very nearly did not survive to be read. That it did is substantially the work of one professor with a bullock cart, a notebook, and no days off for half a century.