Tamil ( ; ) is a
Dravidian language spoken predominantly
by
Tamil people of the
Indian subcontinent.
It has official status in the Indian state of
Tamil
Nadu
and in the Indian union territory of Puducherry
. Tamil is also an official language of
Sri
Lanka
and Singapore
. It is one of the twenty-two
scheduled languages of India and the first Indian language to
be declared as a
classical
language by the
government of
India in 2004.
Tamil is also spoken by significant
minorities in Malaysia
, Mauritius
and Réunion
as well as
emigrant communities around the world.
Tamil literature has existed for
over two thousand years. The earliest
epigraphic records found date from around the
third century
BCE. The earliest period of
Tamil literature,
Sangam
literature, is dated from the 300 BCE – 300 CE. Inscriptions in
Tamil Language from 1st century BCE and 2nd century CE have been
discovered in Egypt and Thailand. The first two ancient manuscripts
from India, to be acknowledged and registered by
UNESCO Memory of the World
register in 1997 & 2005 were in Tamil. More than 55% of the
epigraphical inscriptions – about 55,000 – found by the
Archaeological Survey of
India in India are in the Tamil language. According to a 2001
survey, there were 1,863 newspapers published in Tamil, of which
353 were dailies.
Classification
Tamil belongs to
southern branch of the
Dravidian languages, a family of around
twenty-six languages native to the
Indian subcontinent. It is also
classified as being part of a
Tamil
language family, which alongside Tamil proper, also includes
the languages of about 35 ethno-linguistic groups such as the
Irula, and
Yerukula languages (see
SIL Ethnologue).
The closest major relative of Tamil is
Malayalam. Until about the ninth century,
Malayalam was a dialect of Tamil. Although many of the differences
between Tamil and Malayalam evidence a pre-historic split of the
western dialect, the process of separation into distinct language,
Malayalam was not completed until sometime
in the 13th or 14th century.
History
As a Dravidian language, Tamil descends from
Proto-Dravidian. Linguistic reconstruction
suggests that Proto-Dravidian was spoken around the third
millennium BC, possibly in the region around the lower
Godavari river basin in peninsular India. The
material evidence suggests that the speakers of Proto-Dravidian
were the culture associated with the
Neolithic complexes of
south India. The next phase in the reconstructed
proto-history of Tamil is Proto-South Dravidian. The linguistic
evidence suggests that Proto-South Dravidian was spoken around the
middle of the second millennium BC, and that proto-Tamil emerged
around the third century BC. The earliest
epigraphic attestations of Tamil are generally
taken to have been written shortly thereafter.
Scholars categorise the attested history of the language into three
periods, Old Tamil (300 BC – 700 CE), Middle Tamil (700–1600) and
Modern Tamil (1600–present).
Etymology
The exact period when the name "Tamil" came to be applied to the
language is unclear, as is the precise etymology of the name. The
earliest attested use of the name is in a text that is perhaps as
early as the 1st century BCE.
Southworth suggests that the name comes from > 'self-speak', or
'one's own speech'.
Kamil Zvelebil
suggests an etymology of , with meaning "self" or "one's self", and
" " having the connotation of "unfolding sound". Alternately, he
suggests a derivation of * * , meaning in origin "the proper
process (of speaking)".
(see Southworth's derivation of
Sanskrit term for "others" or Mleccha)
Old Tamil
The earliest records in Old Tamil are short inscriptions from
around the second century BCE in caves and on pottery. These
inscriptions are written in a variant of the
Brahmi script called
Tamil Brahmi. The earliest long text in Old
Tamil is the
Tolkāppiyam, an early work
on Tamil grammar and poetics, whose oldest layers could be as old
as the first century BC. A large number of literary works in Old
Tamil have also survived. These include a corpus of 2,381 poems
collectively known as
Sangam
literature. These poems are usually dated to between the first
and fifth centuries AD, which makes them the oldest extant body of
secular literature in India. Other literary works in Old Tamil
include two long epics,
Cilappatikāram and
Maṇimēkalai, and a number of
ethical and didactic texts, written between the fifth and eighth
centuries A.D.
Old Tamil preserved many features of Proto-Dravidian, including the
inventory of consonants, the syllable structure, and various
grammatical features. Amongst these was the absence of a distinct
present tense – like Proto-Dravidian, Old Tamil only had two
tenses, the past and the "non-past". Old Tamil verbs also had a
distinct negative conjugation (e.g. "I do not see", "we do not
see") Nouns could take pronominal suffixes like verbs to express
ideas: e.g. "we are women" formed from "women" +
- and the
first person plural marker.
Despite the significant amount of grammatical and syntactical
change between Old, Middle and Modern Tamil, Tamil demonstrates
grammatical continuity across these stages: many characteristics of
the later stages of the language have their roots in features of
Old Tamil.
Middle Tamil
The evolution of Old Tamil into Middle Tamil, which is generally
taken to have been completed by the eighth century AD, was
characterised by a number of phonological and grammatical changes.
In phonological terms, the most important shifts were the virtual
disappearance of the aytam, an old phoneme, the coalescence of the
alveolar and dental nasals, and the transformation of the alveolar
plosive into a
rhotic.
In grammar, the most important change was the emergence of the
present tense. The present tense evolved out of the verb , meaning
"to be possible" or "to befall". In Old Tamil, this verb was used
as an
aspect marker to indicate
that an action was micro-durative, non-sustained or non-lasting,
usually in combination with a time marker such as . In Middle
Tamil, this usage evolved into a present tense marker – – which
combined the old aspect and time markers.
Middle Tamil also saw a significant increase in the Sanskritisation
of Tamil. From the period of the
Pallava
dynasty onwards, a number of
Sanskrit
loan-words entered Tamil, particularly in relation to political,
religious and philosophical concepts. Sanskrit also influenced
Tamil grammar, in the increased use of cases and in declined nouns
becoming adjuncts of verbs, and phonology. The Tamil script also
changed in the period of Middle Tamil. Tamil Brahmi and
Vaṭṭeḻuttu, into which it
evolved, were the main scripts used in Old Tamil inscriptions. From
the eighth century onwards, however, the Pallavas began using a new
script, derived from the
Pallava Grantha
script which was used to write Sanskrit, which eventually
replaced Vaṭṭeḻuttu.
Middle Tamil is attested in a large number of inscriptions, and in
a significant body of secular and religious literature. These
include the religious poems and songs of the
Bhakthi poets, such as the
Tēvāram verses on
Saivism and
Nālāyira Tivya
Pirapantam on
Vaishnavism, and
adaptations of religious legends such as the 12th century
Tamil Ramayana composed by
Kamban and the story of 63
shaivite devotees known as Periyapurāṇam.
Iraiyaṉār
Akapporuḷ, an early treatise on love poetics, and
Naṉṉūl, a 12th century grammar
that became the standard grammar of literary Tamil, are also from
the Middle Tamil period.
Modern Tamil
The
Nannul remains the standard normative
grammar for modern literary Tamil, which therefore continues to
based on Middle Tamil of the 13th century rather than on Modern
Tamil. Colloquial spoken Tamil, in contrast, shows a number of
changes. The negative conjugation of verbs, for example, has fallen
out of use in Modern Tamil – negation is, instead, expressed either
morphologically or syntactically. Modern spoken Tamil also shows a
number of sound changes, in particular, a tendency to lower high
vowels in initial and medial positions, and the disappearance of
vowels between plosives and between a plosive and rhotic.
Contact with European languages also affected both written and
spoken Tamil. Changes in written Tamil include the use of
European-style punctuation and the use of consonant clusters that
were not permitted in Middle Tamil. The syntax of written Tamil has
also changed, with the introduction of new aspectual auxiliaries
and more complex sentence structures, and with the emergence of a
more rigid word order that resembles the
syntactic argument structure of English.
Simultaneously, a strong strain of
linguistic purism emerged in the early
20th century, culminating in the
Pure Tamil Movement which called for
removal of all Sanskritic and other foreign elements from Tamil. It
received some support from
Dravidian
parties and
nationalists who
supported
Tamil independence.
This led to the replacement of a significant number of Sanskrit
loanwords by Tamil equivalents.
Geographic distribution

Distribution of Tamil speakers in
South India and Sri Lanka (1961).
Tamil is
the first language of the majority in Tamil Nadu
, India
and Northern
Province
, Eastern Province
, Sri
Lanka
. The language is spoken by small groups of
minorities in other parts of these two countries such as Karnataka
, Kerala
, Andhra Pradesh
and Maharashtra
in case of India and Colombo
, the hill
country
, in case of Sri Lanka.
There are
currently sizable Tamil-speaking
populations descended from colonial-era migrants in Malaysia
, Singapore
, Mauritius
, Réunion
, South Africa, Indonesia
, Thailand
, Burma
, and
Vietnam
.
Many in
Guyana
, Fiji
, Suriname
, and Trinidad and Tobago
have Tamil origins, but only a small number speak
the language. Groups of more recent migrants from Sri Lanka and India exist in
Canada
(especially Toronto
), USA
, Australia, many Middle Eastern countries, and most of the
western European countries.
Legal status
Tamil is the
official language of
the Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
It is one of the official languages of the
union territories of Pondicherry
and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands
It is one of 23 nationally recognised languages in
the Constitution of India
.
Tamil is
also one of the official languages of Sri Lanka
and Singapore
. In Malaysia
, 543 primary education government
schools are available fully in Tamil medium.
In addition, with the creation in 2004 of a legal status for
classical languages by the
government of India and following a
political campaign supported by several Tamil associations Tamil
became the first legally recognised
Classical language of India. The
recognition was announced by the then
President of India, Dr.
Abdul Kalam, in a joint sitting of both houses
of the
Indian Parliament on June
6, 2004.
Dialects
Region specific variations
Tamil is a
diglossic language. Tamil
dialects are primarily differentiated from each other by the fact
that they have undergone different phonological changes and sound
shifts in evolving from Old Tamil.
For example, the word for "here"— in
Centamil (the classic variety)—has evolved into in the
Kongu dialect of Coimbatore
, inga in the dialect of Thanjavur
, and in some dialects of Sri Lanka.
Old
Tamil's (where means place) is the source of in the dialect of
Tirunelveli
, Old Tamil is the source of in the dialect of
Madurai
, and in various northern dialects.Even now
in Coimbatore area it is common to hear " " meaning "that
place".Although Tamil dialects do not differ significantly in their
vocabulary, there are a few exceptions.
The dialects spoken
in Sri
Lanka
retain many words and grammatical forms that are
not in everyday use in India
, and use
many other words slightly differently.
Loanword variations
The
dialect of the district of Palakkad
in Kerala has a large number of Malayalam loanwords, has also been
influenced by Malayalam syntax and also has a distinct Malayalam
accent. Hebbar and
Mandyam dialects, spoken by groups of Tamil
Vaishnavites who migrated to Karnataka
in the eleventh century, retain many features of
the Vaishnava paribasai, a special form of Tamil developed
in the ninth and tenth centuries that reflect Vaishnavite religious
and spiritual values. Several
castes
have their own
sociolects which most
members of that caste traditionally used regardless of where they
come from. It is often possible to identify a person's caste by
their speech.
Tamil in Sri Lanka
incorporates loan words from Portuguese,Dutch and English also.
Spoken and literary variants
In addition to its various dialects, Tamil exhibits different
forms: a classical literary style modelled on the ancient language
( ), a modern literary and formal style ( ), and a modern
colloquial form ( ). These styles shade into each
other, forming a stylistic continuum. For example, it is possible
to write with a vocabulary drawn from , or to use forms associated
with one of the other variants while speaking .
In modern times, is generally used in formal writing and speech.
For instance, it is the language of textbooks, of much of
Tamil literature and of public speaking and
debate. In recent times, however, has been making inroads into
areas that have traditionally been considered the province of .
Most contemporary
cinema,
theatre and popular entertainment on television and
radio, for example, is in , and many
politicians use it to bring themselves closer to
their audience. The increasing use of in modern times has led to
the emergence of unofficial ‘standard' spoken dialects.
In
India
, the ‘standard' is based on ‘educated non-brahmin
speech', rather than on any one dialect, but has been significantly
influenced by the dialects of Thanjavur
and Madurai
. In Sri Lanka
the standard is based on the dialect of Jaffna
.
Writing system

History of Tamil script.
Tamil is written using a script called the . The Tamil script
consists of 12
vowels, 18
consonants and one special character, the
āytam. The vowels and consonants
combine to form 216 compound characters, giving a total of 247
characters. All consonants have an inherent vowel
a, as
with other
Indic scripts. This
inherency is removed by adding an overdot called a , to the
consonantal sign. For example, is
ṉa (with the inherent
a) and is
ṉ (without a vowel). Many Indic scripts
have a similar sign, generically called
virama, but the Tamil script is somewhat different in
that it nearly always uses a visible
puḷḷi to indicate a
dead consonant (a consonant without a vowel). In other
Indic scripts, it is generally preferred to use a ligature or a
half form to write a syllable or a cluster containing a dead
consonant, although writing it with a visible virama is also
possible. The Tamil script does not differentiate voiced and
unvoiced
plosives. Instead, plosives are
articulated with voice depending on their position in a word, in
accordance with the rules of
Tamil
phonology.
addition to the standard characters, six characters taken from the
Grantha script, which was used in the
Tamil region to write Sanskrit, are sometimes used to represent
sounds not native to Tamil, that is, words adopted from Sanskrit,
Prakrit and other languages. The traditional system prescribed by
classical grammars for writing loan-words, which involves
respelling them in accordance with Tamil phonology, remains, but is
not always consistently applied.
Sounds
Tamil phonology is characterised by the presence of
retroflex consonants, multiple
rhotics. Tamil does not distinguish phonologically
between voiced and unvoiced consonants; phonetically, voice is
assigned depending on a consonant's position in a word. Tamil
phonology permits few consonant clusters, which can never be word
initial. Native grammarians classify Tamil phonemes into vowels,
consonants, and a "secondary character", the āytam.
Vowels
Tamil vowels are called (
uyir – life, – letter). The
vowels are classified into short ( ) and long (five of each type)
and two
diphthongs, /ai/ and /au/, and
three "shortened" ( ) vowels.
The long ( ) vowels are about twice as long as the short vowels.
The
diphthongs are usually pronounced
about 1.5 times as long as the short vowels, though most
grammatical texts place them with the long vowels.
Consonants
Tamil
consonants are known as
(
mey—body, —letters). The
consonants are classified into three categories
with six in each category: —hard, —soft or
Nasal, and —medium.
Unlike most Indian languages, Tamil does not distinguish
aspirated and unaspirated consonants.
In addition, the voicing of
plosives is
governed by strict rules in . Plosives are unvoiced if they occur
word-initially or doubled. Elsewhere they are voiced, with a few
becoming
fricatives intervocalic.
Nasal and
approximant are always voiced.
As commonplace in languages of India, Tamil is characterised by its
use of more than one type of
coronal
consonants.
Retroflex
consonants include the
retroflex approximant (ழ) (example
Tami
l), which among the Dravidian languages is
also found in Malayalam (example Ko
zhikode),
disappeared from
Kannada in
pronunciation at around 1000 AD (the dedicated letter is still
found in Unicode), and was never present in Telugu.
Dental and
alveolar consonants also contrast with
each other, a typically Dravidian trait not found in the
neighboring Indo-Aryan languages. In spoken Tamil, however, this
contrast has been largely lost, and even in literary Tamil, and may
be seen as
allophonic.
A chart of the Tamil consonant
phonemes in
the follows:
Phonemes in brackets are
voiced
equivalents. Both voiceless and voiced forms are represented by the
same character in Tamil, and voicing is determined by context. The
sounds and are peripheral to the phonology of Tamil, being found
only in loanwords and frequently replaced by native sounds. There
are well-defined rules for
elision in Tamil
categorised into different classes based on the phoneme which
undergoes elision.
Āytam
Classical Tamil also had a phoneme called the
Āytam, written as ‘ஃ'. Tamil grammarians of
the time classified it as a dependent phoneme (or restricted
phoneme ) ( ), but it is very rare in modern Tamil. The rules of
pronunciation given in the
Tolkāppiyam, a text on the
grammar of Classical Tamil, suggest that the
āytam could
have
glottalised the sounds it was
combined with. It has also been suggested that the
āytam
was used to represent the
voiced
implosive (or closing part or the first half) of geminated
voiced plosives inside a word. The Āytam, in modern Tamil, is also
used to convert
pa to
fa (not the retroflex
zha ) when writing English words using the Tamil
script.
Numerals & Symbols
Apart from the usual numerals, Tamil also has numerals for 10, 100
and 1000. Symbols for day, month, year, debit, credit, as above,
rupee, and numeral are present as well.
0 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
100 |
1000 |
|
௦ |
௧ |
௨ |
௩ |
௪ |
௫ |
௬ |
௭ |
௮ |
௯ |
௰ |
௱ |
௲ |
|
day |
month |
year |
debit |
credit |
as above |
rupee |
numeral |
|
௳ |
௴ |
௵ |
௶ |
௷ |
௸ |
௹ |
௺ |
|
Grammar
Tamil employs
agglutinative grammar,
where suffixes are used to mark
noun
class,
number, and
case, verb
tense and other grammatical categories.
Tamil's standard
metalinguistic
terminology and scholarly vocabularly is itself Tamil, as opposed
to the
Sanskrit that is standard for most
other
Dravidian languages.
Much of Tamil
grammar is extensively
described in the oldest known grammar book for Tamil, the
Tolkāppiyam. Modern Tamil
writing is largely based on the 13th century grammar which restated
and clarified the rules of the
Tolkāppiyam, with some
modifications. Traditional Tamil grammar consists of five parts,
namely ,
col, ,
yāppu, . Of these, the last two
are mostly applied in poetry.
Tamil words consist of a
lexical root to
which one or more
affixes are attached. Most
Tamil affixes are
suffixes. Tamil suffixes
can be
derivational
suffixes, which either change the part of speech of the word
or its meaning, or
inflectional
suffixes, which mark categories such as
person,
number,
mood,
tense, etc. There is no absolute limit on
the length and extent of
agglutination, which can lead to long words
with a large number of suffixes.
Morphology
Tamil nouns (and pronouns) are classified into two super-classes (
)—the "rational" ( ), and the "irrational" ( )—which include a
total of five classes (
pāl, which literally means
‘gender').
Humans and
deities are classified as "rational", and all other
nouns (
animals, objects, abstract nouns) are
classified as irrational. The "rational" nouns and pronouns belong
to one of three classes (
pāl)—masculine singular, feminine
singular, and rational plural. The "irrational" nouns and pronouns
belong to one of two classes – irrational singular and irrational
plural. The
pāl is often indicated through suffixes. The
plural form for rational nouns may be used as an
honorific, gender-neutral, singular form.
Suffixes are used to perform the functions of
case or
postpositions. Traditional grammarians tried to
group the various suffixes into eight cases corresponding to the
cases used in
Sanskrit. These were the
nominative,
accusative,
dative,
sociative,
genitive,
instrumental,
locative, and
ablative. Modern grammarians argue that this
classification is artificial, and that Tamil usage is best
understood if each suffix or combination of suffixes is seen as
marking a separate case. Tamil nouns can take one of four
prefix,
i,
a,
u and
e which are functionally equivalent to the
demonstratives in
English.
Tamil
verbs are also inflected through the use
of suffixes. A typical Tamil verb form will have a number of
suffixes, which show person, number, mood,
tense and voice.
- Person and number are indicated by suffixing the oblique
case of the relevant pronoun. The
suffixes to indicate tenses and voice are formed from grammatical particles, which are added
to the stem.
- Tamil has two voices. The first indicates that the subject of
the sentence undergoes or is the object of the
action named by the verb stem, and the second indicates that the
subject of the sentence directs the action referred to by
the verb stem.
- Tamil has three simple tenses—past, present, and
future—indicated by the suffixes, as well as a series of perfects
indicated by compound suffixes. Mood is implicit in Tamil, and is
normally reflected by the same morphemes
which mark tense categories. Tamil verbs also mark evidentiality, through the addition of the
hearsay clitic .
Traditional grammars of Tamil do not distinguish between
adjectives and
adverbs,
including both of them under the category
uriccol,
although modern grammarians tend to distinguish between them on
morphological and syntactical grounds. Tamil has a large number of
ideophones that act as adverbs indicating
the way the object in a given state "says" or "sounds".
Tamil does not have
article.
Definiteness and indefiniteness are either indicated by special
grammatical devices, such as using the number "one" as an
indefinite article, or by the context. In the first person plural,
Tamil makes a distinction between
inclusive pronouns நாம் (we), நமது (our) that
include the addressee and exclusive pronouns நாங்கள் (we), எமது
(our) that do not.
Syntax
Tamil is a consistently
head-final language. The verb comes
at the end of the clause, with typical word order
Subject Object Verb (SOV). However, word
order in Tamil is also flexible, so that surface permutations of
the SOV order are possible with different
pragmatic effects. Tamil has
postpositions rather than
prepositions. Demonstratives and modifiers
precede the noun within the noun phrase. Subordinate clauses
precede the verb of the matrix clause.
Tamil is a
null subject
language. Not all Tamil sentences have subjects, verbs and
objects. It is possible to construct grammatically valid and
meaningful sentences which lack one or more of the three. For
example, a sentence may only have a verb—such as ("completed")—or
only a subject and object, without a verb such as ("That [is] my
house"). Tamil does not have a
copula (a linking verb equivalent to
the word
is). The word is included in the translations
only to convey the meaning more easily.
Vocabulary
The vocabulary of Tamil is mainly Dravidian. A strong sense of
linguistic purism is found in
Modern Tamil, which opposes the use of foreign loan-words.
Nonetheless, a number of words used in classical and modern Tamil
indicate copying from languages of neighbouring groups, or with
whom the Tamils had trading links, including
Munda (e.g. "frog" from Munda ),
Malay (e.g. "sago" from Malay ),
Chinese (e.g. "skiff" from Chinese san-pan)
and Greek (e.g. from Greek ὥρα). In more modern times, Tamil has
imported words from
Arabic,
Persian,
Urdu and
Marathi, reflecting groups that have
influenced the Tamil area at various points of time, and from
neighbouring languages such as
Telugu,
Kannada and
Sinhala. During the modern period, words
have also been adapted from European languages, such as
Portuguese,
French and
English.
The strongest impact of purism in Tamil has been on words taken
from Sanskrit. During its history, Tamil, along with other
Dravidian languages like
Telugu,
Kannada,
Malayalam etc., was influenced by
Sanskrit in terms of vocabulary, grammar and
literary styles, reflecting the increased trend of
Sanskritisation in the Tamil country. Tamil
vocabulary never became quite as heavily Sanskritised as that of
the other Dravidian languages, and unlike in those languages, it
was and remains possible to express complex ideas – including in
science, art, religion and law – without the use of Sanskrit loan
words. In addition, Sanskritisation was actively resisted by a
number of authors of the late medieval period, culminating in the
20th century in a movement called
(meaning
pure Tamil
movement), led by
Parithimaar
Kalaignar and
Maraimalai
Adigal, which sought to remove the accumulated influence of
Sanskrit on Tamil. As a result of this, Tamil in formal documents,
literature and public speeches has seen a marked decline in the use
Sanskrit loan words in the past few decades, under some estimates
having fallen from 40–50% to about 20%. As a result, the Prakrit
and Sanskrit loan words used in modern Tamil are, unlike in some
other Dravidian languages, restricted mainly to some spiritual
terminology and
abstract nouns.
In the twentieth century, institutions and learned bodies have,
with government support, generated technical dictionaries for Tamil
containing
neologisms and words derived
from Tamil roots to replace loan words from English and other
languages.
Words of Tamil origin occur in other languages. Popular
examples in English are cheroot (
meaning "rolled up"), mango (from
mangai), mulligatawny
(from meaning pepper water), pariah (from
paraiyar), curry
(from
kari),"curry, n.
2",
The Oxford
English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford
University Press. 14 Aug.
2009/dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50056122>. and catamaran (from
, கட்டு மரம், meaning "bundled logs"), pandal (shed, shelter,
booth), tyer (curd), coir (rope). Tamil words are
also found in Sinhala and
Malay.
See also
References
- Caldwell, Robert. 1974. A comparative grammar of the
Dravidian or South-Indian family of languages. New Delhi:
Oriental Books Reprint Corp.
- Fabricius, Johann Philip (1933 and 1972), Tamil and English Dictionary. based on J.P.
Fabricius Malabar-English Dictionary, 3rd and 4th Edition
Revised and Enlarged by David Bexell. Evangelical Lutheran Mission
Publishing House, Tranquebar; called Tranquebar Dictionary.
- Pope, GU (1868). A Tamil hand-book, or, Full introduction
to the common dialect of that language. (3rd ed.). Madras,
Higginbotham & Co.
- (Translated from Tamil by E.Sa. Viswanathan)
Footnotes
External links