M. S. Purnalingam Pillai

Munirpallam Sivasubramaniam Purnalingam Pillai
Born Purnalingam
(1866-05-25)May 25, 1866
Munirpallam,
Tinnevely District,
British India
Died June 6, 1947(1947-06-06) (aged 81)
Madras,
British India
Occupation Madras Christian College faculty
Language Tamil, English
Period 1898 - 1945
Literary movement Tanittamil Iyakkam
Notable works Ravana, The Great King of Lanka

Munnirpallam Sivasubramaniam Purnalingam Pillai (25 May 1866 - 6 June 1947) was a Tamil writer, scholar, historian and Dravidologist.

Early life

Purnalingam Pillai was born on 25 May 1866 to Sivasubramaniam Pillai at Munnirpallam in Tinnevely district. His parents belonged to a Saiva Vellalar family. After his initial education, Pillai joined as a lecturer of English at the Madras Christian College. During this period, Pillai got interested in studying Tamil history and civilization. He edited a Tamil journal called Gnanabodhini along with Parithimar Kalaignar.

Dravidology and political activism

In 1904, Pillai published A Primer of Tamil Literature, the first comprehensive study of Tamil literature as a historical narrative. The narration was strongly imbibed with a Dravidian supremacist point of view. In the early 1920s, when excavations at Harappa and Mohenjodaro were in their nascent stages, Pillai, along with another Dravidologist T. R. Sesha Iyengar pedicted that future discoveries would establish beyond doubt that the Indus Valley Civilization was of Dravidian origin and also along with it the antiquity of Tamil civilization and language.

Works

References

Further reading

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Tuesday, May 03, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.