C T Indra, former Professor of English, University of Madras, Chennai, India, taught in the Department for over three decades. She was a Fulbright Post-doctoral Fellow at Harvard (1980–81) and American Studies Research Fellow at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA (1990). Her areas of interest are Literary Criticism and Theory, Translation and Hagiography. She has translated from Tamiḻ into English short stories, plays, a novella, poems and critical writings. Prema Jagannathan is Associate Professor of English (retired) and former Dean of Academic Affairs at Stella Maris College, Chennai, India. Her areas of interest include Indian Fiction, Bhakti Literature, Translation Studies and Communicative English.
“The book, until now available only in Tamiḻ, paints a picture of Orientalist scholarship as it crystallized in the late-eighteenth century, prior to the discovery by Ellis of the existence of the Dravidian family of languages. At the same time, Dr Govindarajan redeems the fate of Tamiḻ works and the often anonymous Tamiḻ authors who composed in colloquial Tamiḻ and in a mostly oral literary and cultural milieu. One might say that Kindersley was a forerunner of the post-Orientalist, post-Colonial scholars of South Indian languages who have expanded the horizons of early modern South Indian cultures far beyond the prevalent grammatical and dialectal norms”. David Shulman, Professor Emeritus, Hebrew University, Jerusalem