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The first Indian language book ever to be printed was in Tamil, in 1577. After many fits and starts and some spectacular achievements, print and the culture of book publishing became well-recognized facets of Tamil society during the late colonial period. The Province of the Book explores the wonderful world of scholarly and subaltern publishing-especially popular fiction and street literature-in its heyday.
The basis of Tamil book publishing was, to begin with, ...
A rare Indian colony of the Danish empire. A place that fostered the modern printing press and Protestant Christianity in the subcontinent. A tourist haunt that was ravaged by the tsunami in 2004. This is Tranquebar, known as Tharangampadi, a charming coastal town in present-day Tamil Nadu. Beyond Tranquebar is a collection of twenty-four essays by scholars who bring to relief the many dimensions of this town. The book takes us to seventeenth-century Denmark, as ...
Composed at the turn of the Common Era, the ancient poems translated from classical Tamil in Love Stands Alone are breathtaking in their directness, subtle in their nuances and astonishingly contemporary in tone. The poems fall under two broad themes: akam, the interior and puram, the exterior. The akam poems are concerned with love in all its varied situations: clandestine and illicit; conjugal happiness and infidelity; separation and union. The puram poems ...
A historian without linguistic skill and literary abilities and sensibilities would be no historian at all, writes A.R. Venkatachalapathy in the introduction to In Those Days There Was No Coffee. Indeed, this delightful new volume represents that rare thing in Indian history-writing--a thoroughly engaging read. Venkatachalapathy's writings on the cultural history of colonial Tamilnadu would be enjoyed equally by both the scholar looking for a nuanced and lucid ...
Though the city of Chennai is over 350 years old, it has not received the attention that other metropolitan cities in India have. Books on the city that are available are written from a somewhat elite perspective, epitomized by the opposition to the renaming of Madras a few years ago. But the fact is that in Tamil literature it has always been referred to as Chennai. Thus the tussle revolves around the cultural views of colonial Madras and the Chennai of a wider ...