J. M. Somasundaram Pillai

Self published in India in 1968. Physically an interesting book. I’ve seen several Indian books from this period and they’re not well made things. This book stands out by its quality. The author has gone out of his way to make a nice thing. I hate to think what the printing cost him.

Paper covered boards, quarter bound in green cloth. The paper is creamy with a crocodile skin effect and printed with the title page. The pages are properly bound in and you can caress the strings under the pastedown, if that is your wont. The pages are a much better quality paper than you’d expect, though it’s still not quite strong enough for this kind of binding and the strings to tend to tear through if you’re not careful. There’s a list of plates at the front which surprised me as I’d not noticed any on flicking through, but looking again, yes, the illustrations are printed on a paper that may be marginally better quality if you put your mind to it. The copyright page shows a standard and a library edition. I suspect I have a library edition. The standard edition may be a paperback. The dust cover (oh yes, there’s a dust cover. Didn’t I say?) is shorter than the boards but the same height as the pages. There’s a crease on the back which suggests it was once wrapped around a smaller book and the date printed on it is 1967. The co-author, T. P. Meenakshisundaran, apologises in his foreword for having delayed publication. The discrepancy in the dates may be due to these delays, or it could be that Somasundaram Pillai has brought out a better bound edition a year later. Perhaps we will never know.

Anyway, the book opens with Meenakshisundaran’s History of the Tamil Language. This is a technical linguistic work, most of which was over my head. If you’re a linguist or familiar with Tamil it will probably have you drooling with pleasure.

The main part of the book is in a mixture of Tamil, Indian English and British English. Tamil for the quotations, British English for the translations (all of which Somasundaram Pillai quotes from other authors) and Indian English when he writes in his own voice. The differences between the two Englishes are far less than you might when they’re written down, though comprehension is occasionally impaired by the compositor’s idiosyncratic approach to typesetting and Somasundaram Pillai being such a purist he has completed his task without reference to a dictionary.

The contents are astounding.

“It is recorded by commentators and the author of Silappatikāram that for millennia of years, the Tamils occupied a vast expanse of land, south of Cape Comorin, extending to the continents of Australia and Africa. By a volcanic action it was swept over by the waves of the Indian Ocean, and at the same time out of its depths rose up the might Himalayas which resulted in the present configuration of India. Scientific researches conform this…”

From this Indian Atlantis, called Lemuria, the Tamils have populated the entire earth, as evidenced by the amazing similarities between Tamil and Gaelic. I did a bit of digging and apparently this creation myth is nationalist propaganda and was actually taught in schools. The problem is that Somasundaram Pillai is unable to distinguish between myth and history and I had to keep checking wikipedia to work out when he had started talking about real books. His handling of his material is generally disordered and it is often hard to work out when and where he is talking about.

His choice of illustrations is odd. They often bear seemingly no relevance to the text and are reproduced mostly from mouldy photographs. I suspect this is as a result of poor equipment and a humid environment, but my friend Jo, who used to live in India, says it’s art and they do it on purpose. I’m sceptical of this, but will withhold judgement until I’ve seen whether or not they apply a similar filter to digital photography.

As to Tamil literature itself from this period, it is mostly royal encomia and love poetry. There’s obvious historical interest, and I’m sure that in Tamil it’s poetry of great beauty. In translation and stripped of everything except some remarkable metaphors it doesn’t have much that can’t be found natively elsewhere. I suspect this why Tamil literature from this period has failed to take to world by storm.

A difficult book to rate. One the one hand, five stars for effort and the gob-smacking historical claims. On the other, Wikipedia will give you a clearer picture.… (mehr)