Articles by A R Venkatachalapathy

We are deeply shocked and anguished at the cancellation of Amina Wadud’s special lecture organised by the JBAS Centre for Islamic Studies at the University of Madras on 29 July 2013 on the topic “Islam, Gender and Reform”.

It has been almost a century since Robert William D'Escourt Ashe, acting collector of Tirunelveli, Madras Presidency, was killed by R Vanchi Aiyar, an ex-forest guard on 17 June 1911. In 1908 Ashe was stationed in Tuticorin where the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company led by V O Chidambaram Pillai was giving its British rival a run for its money. Workers, merchants and the middle class enthusiastically supported the swadeshis. Ashe was seen as playing a leading part in the government's repression of the swadeshi company and the uprising that followed made national headlines. Vanchi Aiyar who killed himself after shooting Ashe is a patriotic martyr in Tamil Nadu and many radical characters in Tamil fiction and cinema have been named after him.

A R Venkatachalapathy The recent attempts portraying the dravidian movement as a brain-child of saiva vellalar intellectuals aim to discredit the movement by identifying it with the upper castes. By juxtaposing the sectarian interpretation of anti-brahminism of the saivites with the broad anti-religious and anti-patriarchal content of the self-respect agenda, this article draws attention to the wider sources of the dravidian movement.

A K Ramanujan A R Venkatachalapathy A K RAMANUJAN (AKR) passed away suddenly on July 14, at Chicago. Born in Mysore into a Tamil brahmin family, AKR had, as he was fond of remarking, two mother tongues: Tamil and Kannada. For a while he taught at Madurai before he went to the University of Chicago in 1962, where he eventually became professor in The Department of South Asian Languages and Civilisations. AKR was a poet, translator, folklorist and linguist. He was equally proficient in all these vocations, but as a student of Tamil, I would like to believe that he will be chiefly remembered for his translations of classical Tamil poetry.