The Aiyar from Jaffna

October 22, 2016 03:55 pm | Updated October 23, 2016 05:06 pm IST

Muthiah column

Muthiah column

The Aiyar from Jaffna

G Ramanathan writes that he is from Devakottai and that he had heard that there was once a well-known printing press there that was known for its scholarly publications. The press was known as the Senthilnathaiyaswamy Press and his information was that it published an “enlightening” journal called Amirtha Bodhini . Could I tell him something about both? I couldn’t but promised to find out — and this was what I found: Another Jaffna connection with the old Madras Presidency, a man called K V Senthilnatha Aiyar, born of one of the few Brahmin families settled in Jaffna in the late 18th Century. Today happens to be the 168th anniversary of his birth.

A home-tutored student in Tamil and Sanskrit, he studied and became proficient in English in a leading Wesleyan school in Jaffna. Then, in 1870, he accompanied his father Sinnaya Aiyar on a pilgrimage to the Saivite shrines in South India. Back in Jaffna he became a high school teacher but with a growing interest in Saiva Siddhantha. This brought him in 1879 to Trivandrum where he was mentored by Thamotharam Chellappahpillai, a fellow Jaffna Tamil who was judge of the Travancore High Court and later to become its Chief Justice. A spell in Trivandrum was followed by a couple of years teaching in a school in Tirunelveli after which he returned to Jaffna in 1883 to write Kanthapurana Nava Neetham, his best known work. He came to Madras to have it published in 1885 and stayed on in Tamizhagam, teaching in various schools in Tirupattur (Salem District) and in Tirukalikunram. It was in Tirupattur that he started AmirthaBodhini , not Devakottai. But it was in Devakottai that in 1906 he set up the eponymously named press, with the help of Somasundaram Chettiar and Ramanathan Chettiar, presumably of the Devakottai Zamin.

The years between Tirupattur and Devakottai, 1888 to 1898, were spent in Benares, which is from where he derived the initials K V: Kasi Vasi. It was presumably at the famed Nagarathar chatthiram in Kasi that he came in touch with the Chettiars who invited him to Chettinad. Before he passed away in 1924, presumably in Devakottai, the largest town in Chettinad, Chettiar population-wise, he wrote 45 books, all on religious themes. Twenty of these were published by his press in Devakottai, but copies of only about 15 titles are to be found today.

My search for Aiyar led to several other Tamils from Jaffna who made a significant scholarly contribution in Tamizhagam but I doubt whether they are even known to those who today clamour for Eelam. I will introduce them to the reader over the coming months.

*****

Whatever happened to Raja?

 

Whether he was called Raja or not, I do not know, but it is a convenient abbreviation of a name that was well-known in the mid-1990s, P Rajarathinam, but which has since been forgotten. I was, however, reminded of him the other day when reading senior business journalist Sushila Ravindranath’s first book, Surge . How senior may be judged when you recall that she joined Business India , the country’s first business magazine, when it started in 1983, one of the very very few women, if not the first, in business journalism. Seventeen years later, she began a peregrination that took to the editorship of many a communication medium till she decided a few years ago to sit back and write business and political columns. During all those years with the media there was many a book she should have written, but it was only this year we finally caught up with her as an author.

Surge, she says, is ‘Tamil Nadu’s growth story’. I’m not quite sure of that, but in a series of profiles she traces the story of business organisations in Tamil Nadu — from the ‘Old Money’ ones to the ‘New’, the ‘Pioneers’, the ‘Success Stories of the Nineties’ and the ‘New Rock Stars’. But what I like best about this lucidly written collection of brief business stories is the fact that she has also looked at some of the ‘Failures’ and the ‘Disasters’. And that’s when I caught up with Rajarathinam again.

As Sushila writes, “Nobody knew P Rajarathinam in the beginning of 1994, yet he rose to become a star on the Indian corporate horizon.” There was one takeover after another… Tunghabhadra Sugars, Benares State Bank, Apollo Tubes, Garware Paints, even that venerable loss-making publication, The Illustrated Weekly of India of the Times of India group! He kept picking up one loser after another. No one knew where his funding came from, but he confidently told the media he would turn all his acquisitions around.

By 1997, however, he was in trouble. The Income Tax Department, banks, SEBI all had hundreds of questions for him.

Whereupon he just vanished. As Sushila writes, “He went underground, leaving a trail of unpaid clients, bounced cheques and ruined companies.”

Then, suddenly, in 1999, he was back again, taking over loser after loser once more, starting with the Maxworth Group that at the time had estimated losses of Rs. 20 crore. The authorities were soon on his trail again. And once more, Rajarathinam vanished. Sushila ends her recollection of ‘P Rajarathinam — The Mystery Man’ thus: “This time round, Rajarathinam disappeared, never to be heard of again.” There’s the second book for you, Sushila; how about a series of banking mystery-thrillers?

*****

Making Tamil sound better

Referring to A Subbiah’s suggestions on Tamil script reform (Miscellany, October 10) Dr G Sundaram, a retired civilian, reminds me of what he had written to me in a different context ( Madras Musings , April 1, 2003) on the subject. In his recent letter he states the J C Molony, I.C.S., Rajaji and Cho Ramaswamy had also over the years made suggestions for Tamil script reform.

Dr. Sundaram had written in 2003, “While Tamil has only one sound for letters like K, P, T, etc., English has at least two, like K and G, P and B, T and D, etc. Some Indian languages have four sounds.” His “simple solution” is to put a dash over the letter to differentiate the sounds. For instance, K will be ka but K with a dash on top (refer pic) will be ga.

Responding to this suggestion, M Sethuraman had written at the time, “The dash at the top of hard consonants will come in the way when a dot (or a hook) has to be placed on the top of a letter to denote certain sounds. It would be better if the dash is placed at the bottom of the letter. Thus, K will be ka and

K

will be g a , allowing the dot or the hook to be placed on top. Sethuraman went on to say, “I do not understand why Tamil purists fight shy of using the so-called Sanskrit sounds.” There are perfectly good letters in the Sanskritised ones to indicate sounds like ‘s’ in seithi or ‘h’ in Hari . Sethuraman concludes, “But how are we to represent sounds like F, Q, Z etc?” Cho Ramaswamy, he says, had suggested the Tamil appendages be added to these English letters.

In another response, C Sachithananthan writes, quoting Sundaram, that “for most words with Sanskritised sounds, there are Tamil equivalent words.” He also points out that seithi , not cheithi is the correct Tamil pronunciation.

No doubt, the debate is still going on. But it would be nice to hear from someone using a computer with Tamil lettering, whether there have been any simplifications made to get more correct sounds, particularly in respect of proper names like Zanzibar, Faisal, Solomon etc. People certainly don’t like their names mutilated in pronunciation.

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