In June 1954, exactly four hundred years after the first book printed in Tamil was published in 1554, a Tamil scholar could, for the first time, lay his hands on a surviving copy in a Portuguese library. Whilst on a whirlwind tour across Europe, the Reverend Doctor Xavier Thaninayagam paid a brief visit to the Museu Etnográfico Português (now the Museu Nacional de Arqueologia) at Lisbon, whose founder, José Leite de Vasconcelos, chanced upon the book and acquired it for the museum. Stored under lock and key, this treasured imprint was retrieved from the iron safe for Thaninayagam’s perusal. 

The 1554 imprint was a bilingual Tamil-Portuguese text titled Cartilha que contem brevemente ho q todo christão deve apréder pera sua salvação [A brief primer on what a Christian needs to know for his salvation]. The Tamil text, with a preface, was composed by three men from the Tamil country who were then in Lisbon. It is accompanied by an interlinear Portuguese version in two formats. The Tamil text is printed in a relatively larger Gothic typeface as compared to the Portuguese text. Above each line of Tamil text is a literal word-for-word translation printed in red ink, while below it, in black, is an idiomatic translation. The text is prefaced by an abecedary with “Indications regarding transliteration and the phonetic peculiarities to be observed in the pronunciation and accentuation of Tamil in Roman script.” The title page is also printed in two colours, an innovation not to be seen in books printed in India until much later. The start of each section is signified by beautifully carved vignettes. The printing was commissioned by the Portuguese king and the book has all the hallmarks of a royal imprint. The printer was Germão Galhardo, a Frenchman who first established a printing press in Coimbra in 1530. He was one of the most prolific printers in sixteenth century Portugal and famous for his wide variety of vignettes and ornaments. 

Cartilha (Lisbon, 1554); reproduced from the facsimile edition of 1970

During this tour, Xavier Thaninayagam visited libraries across Europe where there was a likelihood of Tamil material being found. What was the driving force that motivated him to visit libraries across Europe in search of Tamil manuscripts and early printed books? And how was he able to gain access to these hallowed portals at short notice?

A Life for Tamil
Xavier Nicholas Stanislaus (1913–1980) was a Tamil Christian from Sri Lanka. Born in Kayts, an island just off the Sri Lankan coast near the city of Jaffna, Xavier had very little connection with Tamil during his youth. After a typical English education in missionary schools and colleges, he joined the Collegio de Propaganda Fide in Rome, where, after five years of rigorous training, he was ordained a priest in 1938. His years in Italy not only gave him an international outlook but also a command over European languages. He also acquired a keen sense of history and archaeology; his graduation thesis, later published as a book titled The Carthaginian Clergy, explored the spread of Christianity to north Africa in the early centuries of the first millennium. 
After he became a priest, his first assignment was as a high school teacher in Tuticorin, a port city on the coast of Tamil Nadu. It was there that Father Xavier became aware of a major chink in his intellectual armour: his inadequacy in Tamil coupled with an ignorance of its literary history. However, within ten years, by 1950, after an intensive course of study and acquiring a master’s degree in ancient Tamil, he became one of the leading researchers in that language. With the zeal only a new convert could possess, he deployed his formidable skills in research, writing and organisation in the service of the language. Having obtained an indult from the church, an indulgence which liberated him from his religious duties, he could now devote all his energies to his chosen cause. Around this period, he adopted the nom de plume, Thani Nayagam (lone hero).

Xavier Thaninayagam returned to Sri Lanka in 1952 to begin a career in teaching and research. The newly independent country needed all hands on board to rebuild its institutions. Thaninayagam worked in the Department of Education of the University of Ceylon in Peradeniya for a decade. In 1962, he moved to Kuala Lumpur to set up the Department of Indian Studies at the newly constituted University of Malaya. His new career enabled him to assume his chosen role as a global champion of Tamil. In the ’50s, Thaninayagam embarked on a series of international trips to propagate his vision of Tamil as a global language. His travels took him, besides the familiar locales of western Europe, to countries as far flung as Japan and Ecuador. 

As an ordained priest with a deep interest in the history of Tamil, it was inevitable that Xavier Thaninayagam would explore the history of Christian literature in Tamil. By the 1940s, it was well known that Tamil was the first Indian language in which books were printed in the sixteenth century by Jesuit missionaries. However, a cogent historical narrative of sixteenth century printing in the Tamil language was still awaited. 

Tamil for Life
Xavier Thaninayagam is sometimes credited – mistakenly – with the discovery of the 1554 Tamil-Portuguese imprint, Cartilha. The first owner of the surviving copy of the Cartilha was Teotonio de Braganza, archbishop of Evora (1530–1602). His library, famous for its collection of books, not just in European languages but also those of the Orient, was inherited by the Carthusian monastery of Evora. It survived multiple religious and political upheavals over the centuries. The book was purchased in 1909 by José Leite de Vasconcelos from an antiquarian bookshop in Lisbon for the paltry sum of 78,000 reis (about one British pound) and deposited in the library of Museu Etnográfico Português. 

The credit for publicising the discovery of the first Tamil imprint, however, goes to two Portuguese medical doctors. Soon after Vasconcelos acquired the book, Francisco Marques de Sousa Viterbo (1845–1910), famous as a poet, art historian and journalist, wrote about the Tamil-Portuguese book in the newspaper, Diário de Notícias. However, the Cartilha again relapsed into obscurity for the next four decades until Américo Cortez Pinto (1896–1979), also a doctor and a poet, took it upon himself to write the definitive book on the art of Portuguese printing. During the course of his researches, he heard about a book kept under lock and key at the Museu Etnográfico. When he saw the imprint, he was quick to realise that it was an “Exemplar único no Mundo!” In his book, Da Famosa Arte da Imprimissão (1948), Cortez Pinto discusses the 1554 imprint in great detail, commenting not just on its printing and typographical aspects but also expounding on the pedagogical principles it is based on. It was this book that led Xavier Thaninayagam to Lisbon in June 1954. 

For Thaninayagam, the Cartilha was not merely a literary or print curiosity. Its words embodied the two things he held the most dear in life: Tamil and Christianity. He hoped to transliterate the Tamil text into Tamil script and analyse its contents, and perhaps publish a quatercentenary edition. Thaninayagam could not undertake a detailed study of the imprint during his visit and requested that a copy of the book be made for him. But this was never forthcoming. 

At around the same time, the Harvard Library acquired an imprint printed in the Tamil script in 1578. Its discovery was announced in 1952 in an article written by the Jesuit historian, Georg Schurhammer and G W Cottrell, librarian at Harvard. Titled Tambiran Vannakkam, this sixteen-page book was printed in Quilon (Kollam) at the Colegio do Saluador. The text of the Portuguese Doctrina Christam was translated into Tamil by Henrique Henriques at Punnaikayal, a port just south of Tuticorin, and the main possession of the Portuguese on the Coromandel Coast in the second half of the sixteenth century. Thaninayagam obtained a photostat copy of the book from Harvard. In return, he shared a copy of the 1579 Tamil imprint, Kristtiyani Vanakkam, printed at Cochin. The original of this book had disappeared from the Sorbonne in Paris but a copy made for Schurhammer fortuitously found its way to Thaninayagam at Tuticorin. 

Flos Sanctorum (Punnaikayal, 1586), discovered by Thaninayagam at Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana

At the Biblioteca Nacional in Lisbon, Thaninayagam discovered a manuscript of the oldest Tamil grammar composed by a Christian missionary. This was the ‘Arte da grammatica da lingua Malabar’ by Henrique Henriques, composed in 1549.  

During the 1954 tour, Xavier Thaninayagam also visited the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. As an alumnus of the Collegio de Propaganda Fide, he may have had ready access to its inner recesses. While working in the manuscript section of the library, he made two discoveries. The first was an early printed Tamil text: the monumental Flos Sanctorum [Lives of Saints] of Henrique Henriques printed at Punnaikayal in 1586. Since the title page and front matter was missing, a handwritten note in Spanish had been appended to the book leading to its misclassification as a manuscript. Secondly, he discovered the printed version of Vocabulario Tamulico (printed in 1687 at Ambalacatta), a book whose manuscript he had first seen in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. 

Thaninayagam also encountered numerous other artefacts related to Tamil: palm-leaf manuscripts of classical Tamil texts, more modern Tamil manuscripts written on paper, Tamil books printed in the eighteenth century in Tranquebar and elsewhere, missionary letters and reports related to the Tamil country, and much more. The wealth of material in Tamil was such that an international team of scholars would be needed to undertake a serious study. 

A Voice for Tamil
In 1952, Thaninayagam started a quarterly research journal, Tamil Culture, under the auspices of the Tamil Literature Society, Tuticorin. It was published in English, not Tamil, so as to reach a global audience. Tamil Culture soon became the leading journal in its arena. Not only did Thaninayagam edit the journal for the fifteen years it was in existence, he also wrote extensively in it. His European tours resulted in two articles in Tamil Culture. In ‘Tamil Manuscripts in European Libraries’ (October 1954), Thaninayagam explained his motivation for researching Tamil in European libraries:

From time to time various scholars have suggested a complete cataloguing of the Tamil manuscripts and printed Tamil books available both in India and Ceylon as well as in foreign countries, but hitherto only some preparatory work necessary for the documentation of such literature has been done here and abroad. The present writer undertook a tour of some of the more important libraries of Europe for purposes of a preliminary survey of Tamil material available in them, and for the short time he was able to devote to this work he has been more than amply rewarded. 

Thaninayagam narrates his encounter with the Cartilha in ‘The First Books printed in Tamil’ (Tamil Culture, July 1958). This was the first time that the book was being described in English. He also provided a detailed account of the 1586 Flos Sanctorum. Thaninayagam himself seems not to have done any more work in arena of early printed Tamil books. Much later, in 1966, Thaninayagam published a critical edition of the 1687 Tamil-Portuguese dictionary. He had to devote his energies to more important matters.  

The crowning achievement of Thaninayagam’s career was the organisation of a series of International Conference-Seminars of Tamil. Modelled on the World Conference of Orientalists, these meetings were organised on a grand scale and attracted scholars of Tamil from all parts of the world. The first conference was organized in Kuala Lumpur in 1966; it was followed by the Madras conference of 1968 and the Paris conference in 1970. Thaninayagam, the driving force behind these events, managed to convince the leading researchers of the language to participate in these conferences. The unique status of Tamil as a language with a living heritage of two thousand years was underlined in these events. Inevitably, political support had to be sought for these grand spectacles. While the Prime Minister of Malaysia inaugurated the first conference, the Chief Minister of Madras State was specially invited to Kuala Lumpur. At the Madras conference, the newly elected Chief Minister, himself a Tamil writer of no mean repute, used the platform to press the case for Tamil in opposition to Hindi. 

Commemorative stamp issued during the Second International Conference-Seminar of Tamil Studies (Madras, 1968)

After his retirement in the early 1970s, Xavier Thaninayagam returned to Sri Lanka and settled in Jaffna. After independence, the position of Tamil had become particularly tenuous in Sri Lanka. A resurgence of Sinhala nationalism accompanied by the systematic marginalisation of Tamil had put speakers of both these languages on a collision course. It was in such an atmosphere that the fourth Tamil International Conference was convened in Jaffna in 1974. Thaninayagam, now recognised as the global champion of Tamil, presided over the conference. The Sri Lankan police, displeased for various reasons, disrupted the conference proceedings leading to significant loss of life and limb. The attack provoked retaliations and assassinations which eventually led to the civil war that engulfed the island nation for the next four decades and more. 

Xavier Thaninayagam spent the last years of his life as a refugee in the land of his birth. In April 1980, a few months before his death, Thaninayagam delivered the Chelvanayagam Memorial Lecture which proved to be his swansong. In this lecture,
Thaninayagam presented an exhaustive survey of global Tamil research initiatives but the tenor of his lecture was overshadowed by contemporary circumstances:

But for research as well as for the conservation and development of culture, we need leisure, peace of mind and a happy existence. Unfortunately our energies have to be spent in a daily battle for our rights and even our existence and identity as a partner nation in a bilingual state. However, our national contribution to Tamilology, our organisation of the Fourth Conference - Seminar of Tamil Studies in spite of an adverse and hostile Government, and our Jaffna University with its rich promise and burgeoning scholars, offer us encouragement, hope and trust.