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Pioneering publishing
S. MUTHIAH
Aerial view of the Navalar Vidyanupalana Press. — Pic by S. R. Raghunathan
DURING A short break in Australia catching up with family, friends and former colleagues, I was also invited to catch up with a bit of Tamil literary history at a meeting held in Sydney to commemorate the 125th death anniversary of Arumuga Navalar. I was, however, returning to Madras about then and could not attend the meeting, but the invitation did make me recall that Arumugam the Orator had, in his time, strong connections with Madras and Chidambaram and that vestiges of those connections still survive.
Navalar, a Sri Lankan Tamil from Jaffna, has been described as the leading Hindu social reformist of the 19th Century in the Island, the foremost champion of Saiva Siddhantha and the father of the modern Tamil Prose. I am not competent to comment on these statements, but recall having over many decades, heard him being revered as philosopher and writer. More up my street, however, have been his connections with Madras and Chidambaram.
Educated in a Wesleyan school in Jaffna whose principal was the Rev. Peter Percival, Arumugam's scholarly fluency in both English and Tamil caught the attention of the missionary who in 1840 had been requested by the Wesleyan Missionary Society in Madras to translate the Bible into Tamil. In 1841, he recruited the 20-year-old Arumugam, who had begun teaching in the school, to help him with the translation. Working six hours a day together, the two finished the work in1846. Arumugam came to Madras for the first time soon afterwards, accompanying Percival, to see the translation through the Madras Bible Society's scrutiny and, then, through the press. Eventually, what became known as the Union Tentative Edition of the Bible came out in 1850, published by the American Christian Mission here.
By now, Arumugam had parted ways rather unhappily with the missionaries and had begun getting interested in Saivism. He not only began speaking about the Saiva saints, but he began writing about them too. To get his writing into print, he came to Madras in 1849 and returned to Jaffna with equipment to set up a printing press there. It was during this visit to the Presidency that the head of the Thiruvavaduthurai Mutt conferred on him the title `Navalar' after hearing him expound on Saivism. These views of his, much of it simplified in tracts for children, kept his press busy, but he sought a wider audience for his writings and, so, came to Madras in 1858.
In 1860, he established the Navalar Vidyanupalana Press at 300, Mint Street, and there it remains a ghostly presence in premises bearing the new number 25. Assisted by his disciple N. K. Sathasivam Pillai, he issued in print for the first time the Thirukkural, with notes by Parimelahar. This 1860 publication was followed the next year by another conversion from ola to print, Thirukkovaiyar by Manickavasagar, Navalar adding the notes himself. From this press-cum-sales depot-cum-residence, there were issued scores of titles in the years that followed. Today, only the sales depot functions there, perfunctorily at that, and the ghost of Navalar walks through the desolation of his press and Madras home.
The sales depot is today run by the Navalar Trust that was established to run the Navalar High School that Arumuga Navalar established in Chidambaram in 1867 and which still thrives. His second printing press, which he set up in Chidambaram, is no more, but the titles printed at both presses are still being reissued - making it very likely, with its 144-year-old tradition, the oldest continuous Tamil publishing activity on both sides of the Palk Strait. With all officialdom's talk of honouring Tamil, perhaps it should also be looking with more focus at means of preserving Navalar's press and home in Mint Street as a heritage landmark.
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