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இளங்குமரனார் தமிழ்வளம் – 26
what has been rendered by the biographer in the book under review. Irrespective of the venue of his activity-Tuticorin or Colombo, Madras or Tirunelveli-and avocation-clerk or partner of a company or an orginator and promoter of the South India Saiva Siddhanta Works Publishing Soceity, he deployed the same fervor.
The diction employed by the author in this biography is so attractive and the style classical, that I could brook no interruption, while absorbed in reading it. The language is chaste and rythmic and at the sametime strong and powerful depicting how Tiruvarangam Pillai met the arguments of those who opposed him, baffling them.
Arangar, as Tiruvarangam Pillai is affectionately called in this book, was undaunted, while not only those who differed from him generally, but also those, supposed to be close to him, picked holes in the performance of his duties relating to the Saiva Siddhanta Works Publishing Soceity. He was sure of his ground. There was nothing wrong or out of the way in what he did, but the defects attributed to his work were either baseless or invented by the jealous of him or due to faulty understanding and misinformation. He stood like a rock against odds and but for him, the South India Saiva Siddhanta Works Publishing Soceity would not have grown to such dimensional proportion, as it is today.
Arangar held strong views on the question of speaking and writing chaste Tamil, avoiding induction of words from Sanskrit and other languages into Tamil. He felt perfectly convinced that the Tamil language not only lost its natural form and charm by such an admixture, but also that such dilution of the language had given room for the false notion that Tamil was derived from Sanskrit. The dilution had paved the way for Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam and Tulu to break away from it as separate entities. Had not Sanskrit words forged their way into Tamil, these languages would not have sprung up and the South would be speaking one language today. He was not worried by the bogey of those, dubbing persons advocating the use of chaste Tamil as 'Puritanic.' Himself a firm believer in the use of pure Tamil and an advocate of the same, his devotion to the
