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PREFACE
The Tamil Work on St. manickavachakar's life and Times:' which appewars in th following pages, is the fruit of six years:' arduous labour almost unremitting except on a few occasions when it had to be laid aside for a short period of a month and a half each time, in order to make room for the preparation of smaller works that demanded my exclusive attention on such occasions. The work war begun on the 16th of August, 1992 and completed only on the 5th of September, 1928.
During this long interval, the first call came to me from the Secretary of the All - india Oriental Conference for the contribution of a paper in English on the system of Saiva Siddhanta, to be read at its sittings that were to commence then in madras on the 23rd of Decenber. 1924. In Response to the call, I prepared a paper in English on 'The Conception of God as Rudra' but at the end of a month and a half when the work had progressed to three-fourths of the whole, the secretary pressed me for the paper. I, therefore, sent a copy of it so far writtern and after the emergency was over, left it incomplete and returned to this my Tamil work, for its subject - matter was ever present in my mind and interested me more than anything else.
Again in the first quarter of the year 1926, many of my readers and friends repeatedly expressed their wish for a second edition of my treatish on 'caste and its Evil' which was long out of print. And in compliance with their wish I had to leave the present work for time and direct my attention to rewriting the book on 'caste and its Evil'. To keep it abreast of the times, much new and additional matter was
