His contribution extended beyond authorship to publishing, archival research, institutions, international gatherings, reference works, and a sustained lecture circuit. Tamil Wikipedia credits him with 137 books and booklets in Tamil and English.
01 · Publishing
Tamil Culture
While based in Tuticorin he founded the Tamil Literature Society and, around 1951–1952, launched Tamil Culture, an English-language quarterly dedicated to Tamil literature, history, art, and society. Tamil Wikipedia records his editorial run as 1951–1959.
The quarterly reached universities in Europe and America and carried work by scholars including Kamil Zvelebil, Jean Filliozat, Mikhail Andronov, Murray Emeneau, F. B. J. Kuiper, J. R. Marr, C. R. Boxer, and Thomas Burrow—researchers working largely outside Tamil-speaking regions.
In 1961 he founded the Academy of Tamil Culture in Madras, and after the first conference he briefly edited the Journal of Tamil Studies from Malaysia.
02 · Institution building
International Association for Tamil Research
In January 1964, working with Kamil Zvelebil and V. I. Subramaniam, he convened Tamil scholars attending an Orientalists’ meeting in New Delhi. On 7 January, twenty-six scholars founded the International Association for Tamil Research.
Jean Filliozat of France became the association’s first president, with Thomas Burrow, Murray Emeneau, T. P. Meenakshisundaram, and Mu. Varadarajan as vice-presidents; Thani Nayagam and Zvelebil served as joint secretaries. The association became the durable body that has carried international Tamil conference-seminars forward ever since.
03 · Conference leadership
Kuala Lumpur, 1966
As general secretary he organised the First International Conference-Seminar of Tamil Studies in Kuala Lumpur from 16 to 23 April 1966. His relationships with Malaysian ministers V. T. Sambanthan and V. Manickavasagam helped secure government support; prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman presided, and Tamil Nadu chief minister M. Bhaktavatsalam attended.
At the conference he released his reprint of Antão de Proença’s Tamil–Portuguese dictionary, returning a seventeenth-century scholarly tool to circulation. The published proceedings remain a primary record of the gathering.
04 · Archival research
Early Tamil print rediscovered
During lecture tours and European library visits he searched for medieval Tamil manuscripts and early printed books. The 1554 Luso-Tamil Catechism, identified in Lisbon in 1950, is the best-documented rediscovery associated with his name.
Encyclopaedia accounts also associate him with the recovery of Thambiran Vanakkam (1578), Kiristiani Vanakkam (1579), and Proença’s Tamil–Portuguese dictionary, and with the 1549 grammar manuscript Arte da Lingua Malabar by Henrique Henriques—the earliest known grammar of Tamil by a foreign scholar, published in English translation by Jeanne Hein in 2013.
05 · Reference works
A guide to world Tamil scholarship
His Reference Guide to Tamil Studies (1966) gathered some 1,335 titles published about Tamil in Latin, French, German, Russian, Malay, and English into a 122-page guide, so that scholars anywhere could enter the field.
He also arranged for Simon Casie Chetty’s Tamil Plutarch to be corrected, expanded by T. P. Meenakshisundaram, and republished—an act of scholarly stewardship typical of his method.
06 · International teaching
A global lecture circuit
He lectured on Tamil language and literature in Japan and across several countries in the Americas, including Chile, Brazil, Peru, Mexico, Ecuador, and the United States, often teaching Tamil as a visiting professor while travelling.
The Anna Centenary Library and Tamil Wikipedia both record that he delivered more than 200 lectures during one year of travel—an extraordinary public commitment for a working scholar-priest.
The gathering he organised
Kuala Lumpur, April 1966
As general secretary of the International Association for Tamil Research he organised the First International Conference-Seminar of Tamil Studies—opened by Malaysia’s prime minister, attended by Tamil Nadu’s chief minister, and published in two volumes of proceedings that remain a primary record of the event.
The timeline places the conference in sequence, and the archive links to the published proceedings themselves.
The English-language quarterly he founded and edited made Tamil scholarship readable to universities that did not already work in Tamil. Surviving early issues—and the collected volumes digitised since—are primary evidence of that international ambition.
Titles below combine Open Library bibliographic records with works named in English and Tamil Wikipedia. Prefer library records when checking a specific edition.
1952
தமிழ்த் தூது
His first collection of Tamil literary essays, recorded in Tamil Wikipedia
தமிழர் பண்பாடு நேற்றும் இன்றும் நாளையும் (Tamil culture: yesterday, today, and tomorrow)
உலக ஒழுக்கவியலில் திருக்குறள் (The Tirukkural in world ethics)
Tamil Wikipedia also records that some thirty of his research articles appeared in Tamil Culture and around seventy more in other journals and conference volumes.
