Ravi the blogger

  Apart from being storehouses of wealth, power and spirituality as well, Tanjore’s temples were also rich in history and historical records. And though Tanjore did not leave much to be unearthed , the past had not yet been understood though it was available to everyone, everywhere - inscribed on the walls, floors and pillars of temples. It required the genius of men who could read old scripts – people like Eugen Hultzsch and V. Venkayya, to decipher the inscriptions of Tanjore’s temples, most importantly, the Big Temple or Brihadeeswarar Temple and publish them in hardbound volumes sponsored by the Archaeological Survey of India.   While Kumbakonam’s temples had been embroiled in politics, Tanjore’s were comparatively free of their influence. The Brihadeeswarar Temple, the only temple of note in the city, was still administered by the charities of the erstwhile Mahratta royal family and archaeologists like Hulztsch had ready access to it. The first to use the Brihadeeswarar...

  There were many distinguished writers from the period between the World Wars but from amongst them, two names stand out for the extremely passionate, almost filial affection for the river Cauvery that pervades their writings. They were Kalki and Venkataramani. As writers, they were in fact, poles apart. One wrote mostly in Tamil; the other, in Tamil as well as English but more frequently in English. The former is universally hailed as the ‘father of Tamil historical fiction’ and rarely did he venture to take on a contemporary subject though his successful Sahitya Academy award winner Alai Osai   (1948) and the novel Thyagabhoomi   that was made into a blockbuster movie (1939)   proved that he could comfortably handle other genres, too; the other wrote English novels on Indian village life and at the head of the plot he usually placed a Gandhian protagonist who preached temperance and enlisted support for the freedom movement and even while writing on a subject that...