09-05-2025
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman reviews Nirmala Lakshman's book ‘The Tamils: A Portrait of a Community'
Nirmala Lakshman's new book The Tamils: A Portrait of a Community is considered more than just a political history of the community. It has been hailed as a layered effort to shine a spotlight on the epigraphy, archaeology, architecture and culture of the people from southern India whose recorded historical existence has been for more than a millennium.
Lakshman is currently Publisher and Chairperson of The Hindu Group of Publications and was earlier Joint Editor of the paper. She founded and edited The Hindu Literary Review, conceptualised and created Young World, India's only children's newspaper supplement, and developed several other feature sections of The Hindu. She launched The Hindu's annual literature festival and continues to curate it.
Lakshman has a PhD in postmodern fiction, and has written a book on Chennai, Degree Coffee by the Yard, and edited an anthology of contemporary Indian journalism, Writing a Nation.
Among a slew of reviews on her latest book is one by the Finance Minister, Government of India, and senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader, Nirmala Sitharaman, who in 2025 created history by becoming the first person to table the union budget eight consecutive times.
Sitharaman, in her article, in The Book Review, an India-based peer-reviewed academic journal covering reviews of books on various subjects, opens with a well-known character from Tamil literature — the Sangam poet, Avvaiyyar. 'Growing up, most Tamils including me, have read about the many Avvaiyyars — traditionally, elderly women who were wise counsels to kings. I fondly remember the story from the Madurai-Pazhani region, featuring the Avvai of the 'sutta pazham, sudadha pazham' fame, where Lord Murugan teaches Avvai about the richness of Tamil vocabulary with riddles and puns. However, what I didn't know and learned from The Tamils: A Portrait of a Community by Nirmala Lakshman is that there is an ongoing Avvai festival in the Viswanatha Swamy temple in Vedaranyam in Nagapattinam district, to celebrate the many Avvais of Tamil Nadu.'
Sitharaman also mentions that Lakshman highlights another festival — the Meenpudi Thiruvizha, a celebration of people congregating to catch fish in the southern villages of Tamil Nadu. She however adds, that the classical examples that we associate with 'justice and fairness in the generational memory of the Tamil people is curiously missing' referring to King Manuneedhi Konda Cholan (250 BCE) but that Lakshman brings to life a lesser-known incident. 'This is about the Pallava King Mahendra Varman I (600-630 CE), who through his Sanskrit play Mattavilasa Prahasana critiques judicial corruption in a tongue-in-cheek way, through the character of the housemaid.'
'Such lucid stories colour Lakshman's approach to writing about the Tamils as a community. She does not saddle us with burdensome footnotes, instead concocting a rich and delightful mix of her field work, oral history, archaeological surveys, and vivid interviews with domain experts as well. While she chooses to arrange her book chronologically and with broad compartmentalisation, each chapter is also self-contained, making access to the book that much easier,' she says.
'In recent times, the Tamil mind has seen the geographical areas of the Moovvender — Cheras, Cholas, Pandyas — as distinctly separate. This could have come about either because of history books or due to regional affiliations. However, Lakshman is able to clearly tell us that these have been overlapping geographical territories where each of the kingdom's presence was distinctly seen and felt. This is because the Cheras, Cholas and Pandyas, had begun to establish their territories even during the Sangam era, although their days of glory came later in the early Common Era. Lakshman quotes historian KA Nilakanta Sastri on the fact that the pillars of Emperor Ashoka (270 BCE – 230 BCE) had referred to all three dynasties,' she says, adding that the book also traverses the coastline mentioning a ruined Buddhist vihara in Nagapattinam.
Sitharaman however feels that the vacuum of about 300 years of post-Sangam history could have been better explored given that Lakshman is a journalist-historian.
However, she adds, 'The author does well to highlight the principle of fairness in Queen Sembian Mahadevi's treatment of her arch rivals. The pride of India—the ancient Chola bronzes—are thanks to this great queen's patronage.'
Sithraman then discusses how the Tamil society continued to evolve itself. 'In 1939, Vaidyanatha Iyer, a Gandhian, and Muthuramalinga Thevar, a close friend of Subhash Chandra Bose, took Dalits to enter the Madurai Meenakshi Temple. This was a watershed moment in social justice in 20th century Tamil political history. Disappointingly, this hardly finds a mention in this book. The circumstances, the fallout, and consolidation of reform in Tamilakam outside the Dravidian Movement (then Justice Party, and later Dravidar Kazhagam) is given short shrift.'
She delves into how Lakshman has brought the social justice question up to date with the mention of the Vengaivayal water tank case. 'Now, looking back, even after 90 years, social justice has not improved — on the contrary, bitter incidents mark the social fabric. Some of these, like the Vengaivayal water tank case have been captured by Lakshman in her book. More coverage of alternative voices with diverse perspectives on such matters of social justice would have given a fairer picture.'
She rounds it off with, 'Despite these flags, author Nirmala Lakshman's book is an extraordinary attempt which carefully gathers little and large events of Tamil Nadu's hoary history. She manages to traverse a wide spectrum of the lived social, political, and cultural realities of a people over a couple of millennia. This is no easy feat.'
Courtesy: The Book Review
