Böcker av M S Purnalingam Pillai

Ten Tamil saints: sketches of their lives, works and teachings, together with bibliographies. by M S Purnalingam Pillai first published in 1915.This book contains life-sketches of ten great saints and seer that have appeared in the Tamil land. These saints have exercised profound influence on the religion and culture of the Tamil people; their live and songs are still read an admired all over the country and are a source o inspiration to many a pious and ardent soul. The character and piety of these saints make them an eminent group among India's spiritual sons.The author has dealt with the lives of these saints in a new light and in a concise form. While basing their lives largely on the accounts left by medievel chroniclers, he has also availed himself of the researches of modern Tamil scholars and treated the subject in a historical and critical sprit. Ample quotations are given from the work or these saints and poets to illustrate their teaching and their faith.

Tamil India by M. S. Purnalingam Pillai first published in 1945. Tamilaham or the home of the Tamils was in the hoary past the southern regions of the large island known as Navalam or Sambu Divu. This island, one of the first land-formations on either side of the equator, was bounded on the north by the Vindhya mountains and touched Australia, Africa, and China on the south, west and east respectively.

Critical Studies in Kural by M S Purnalingam Pillai first published in 1929. The name " Thiruvalluvar " means " the great man of the Valluva community " and the title " Kural " signifies the metre of the poem. Both the author and his work have borne no proper or distinctive names. Nor is anything reliable known either of his parentage, or of his career. But the work exists or is extant as a whole, unadulterated by schismatic and unimpaired or untampered with by copyists in the procession of ages. That the poet was a keen observer of nature, animate and inanimate, a diligent student of ancient classics on ahapporul and purapporul, .on rhetoric and dialectic, on morality and statecraft, on agriculture and medicine, on folk-lore, tree-and-plant-lore, and on sex psychology and erotic diplomacy, and was a practical thinker and reformer, is beyond all cavil or question. Nobody doubts his poetic artistry (vide Tiru-Valluva-mallai, stanza 45, ' elutthu-asai etc.') and his noble sentiments in his masterpiece of Tamil literature composed of apophthegms in brief couplets.

RAVANA The Great King of Lanka BY M S PURNALINGAM PILLAI first published in 1923. If the hasty Reader, who has professed himself to be a highly discerning critic and to be endowed with the indispensable technique of the proverbial Indian 'annam' or swan, should chance to come across this little book, he would certainly play to the gallery with the blazing head-line Rakshas ! Excelsior ! It is hard to expect that men who have moved in particular grooves for years will ever easily get out of them or that the deep-rooted prejudices consecrated by time and circumstances will die an easy death. The much-maligned Ravana of the earliest Aryan Chronicler and purana writer and of the thoughtless Dravidian echoer of subsequent times cannot have his merits-and virtues duly recognized until English education, now pursued merely as bread-study, broadens and liberalizes the cramped and idea-obsessed Indian mind and wipes out his slave mentality altogether. If this booklet will provoke thought on the subject, its author will feel amply repaid for his labours.