A History Of Tamil Prose Through Missionary Texts, Native Diaries, Printed Stories And Colonial Textbooks

This book introduces for the first time the various prose works in Tamil.composed by the European missionaries that are unfamiliar to readers. The study outlines the origin of Tamil prose through translation of books from Portuguese, Latin, and German. Thereafter the missionaries composed prose works in the free style of spoken Tamil. The volume traces the two distinct and different stages of early development of Tamil prose literature and explains how Tamil prose was born, developed and flourished. The author argues that prose grew was the product of European missionaries and the contents and message communicated are dominantly Christian in nature. Tamil prose also got liberated by Tamils through writing diaries in spoken Tamil, through the stories in Tamil prose besides the textbooks written for schools and printed. The ground-breaking chapters provide incise and in depth analysis of the prose texts that emerged during the age of missionary expansion and colonial administration. It highlights how considerable body of various prose works though became available, the rise of prose fiction first saw the stories told and retold and finally led to the birth of novel writing in Tamil.

S. Jeyaseela Stephen is Directeur, Institut pour études Indo-Européennes. He was Professor of Maritime History (2001-13) at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan. He has authored numerous books on the maritime history of early modern India including The Coromandel Coast and its Hinterland: Economy, Society and Political System, 1500-1600 (1997); Expanding Portuguese Empire and the Tamil Economy, Sixteenth-Eighteenth Centuries (2009); Oceanscapes: Tamil Textiles in the Early Modern World (2014); A Meeting of the Minds: European and Tamil Encounters in Modern Sciences, 1507-1857 (2016); Tranquebar in Global History, 1620-1801: The Coromandel Coast and Europe in a World Network System (2020); and From European Dwelling Settlements to Global Cities: Ports of the Tamil Coast and the Colonial Modernity (2021). His books have been translated into Chinese, Danish, German and Tamil. He is the recipient of the BEST BOOK PRIZE OF THE YEAR 1999 from the Government of Tamil Nadu.