Natesa Sastri

S. M. Natesa Sastri (1859–1906) was a noted exponent of Harikatha. He came from Tiruvarur and lived during the second half of the 19th century and the first 20 years of the 20th century.

Pandit

Natesa Sastri
Natesa Sastri before 1903
Born1859
Manakkal, Tiruchirappalli district[1]
Died1906
Triplicane
Occupationwriter, Manager in the office of Inspector General of Documents Registration, Madras.
LanguageTamil
NationalityBritish India
CitizenshipBritish India
EducationBachelor's degree in Arts
Alma materMadras University
Subjectfolk
Signature

Life

Sastri was born in a traditional Brahmin family and educated at Kumbakonam College and the Madras University. At 22, he joined the Archaeological Survey of India as an assistant to Robert Sewell.[2]

Chembai Vaidyanatha Bhagavatar was one of his prominent disciples.[3]

In 1906, he died tragically after being trampled by a horse at a temple festival in Madras.[2]

Work

His most popular works were his collections of Tamil folk tales. He published a four-volume collection of Tamil folk tales titled The Folklore of Southern India (1884-88). He believed that folklore was national literature, and that it was "the most trustworthy manifestation of people's real thoughts and characteristics."[4] Sastri's collections were based on Tamil versions of the folk tales drawn from his own memory and translated to English, and addressed to non-Indian audiences.[5]

It was Richard Carnac Temple, a British folklorist in India who served as the President of the Folklore Society, who inspired Sastri's work and encouraged him to publish his first book on the tales. One review of the Folklore Society proclaimed that Sastri was the only Hindu member of the organisation.[2]

Sastri was very keen in emphasising the importance of folktales. However, despite the irrefutably native credentials of folklore, it did not ultimately become an important vehicle for nationalism in Madras, having been eclipsed by the Tamil classics of the Sangam period.[6]

Apart from his work on folk tales, Sastri published critical studies of Sanskrit literature, translations of Valmiki's Ramayana and several of Shakespeare's plays and six Tamil novels, over his twenty-five year long scholarly career.[2]

Novels
  • His first original Tamil novel, Dinadayalu was first published under a pseudonym in 1900. It was the story of a Brahmin man whose mother died when he was young. A revised and enlarged edition appeared in 1902.[7]
  • The Rejuvenation of Komalan (1902), is a piece of bizarre comic romance in which two sisters obtain a drug which makes younger.[7]
  • The Two Orphans (1902) is a moralising story covering the life of two orphaned sisters from their birth till their marriage.[7]
  • A Wife Condoned (1903) is a melo-dramatic story in which a woman has an adulterous relationship with another man. The motif of women's adultery was quite new in Tamil fiction at the time.[7]
  • The Mother-in-Law in Council (1903) is somewhat a historical novel combining social criticism, set in the 18th century.[7]

References
  1. Chandrasekharan, G. (13 November 2008). "Chandra: My Great Grand Father Shri Pandit Natesa Sastri Avargal". Chandra. Retrieved 10 November 2019.
  2. Blackburn, Stuart H.; Dalmia, Vasudha (2004). India's Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century. Permanent Black. pp. 130–132. ISBN 978-81-7824-056-5.
  3. "A-rags-to-riches-story". The Hindu. Retrieved 2 February 2017.
  4. "Nationalism in India" (PDF). India and the Contemporary World - II. New Delhi: NCERT. 2011. p. 72. ISBN 978-81-7450-707-5. OCLC 750383036.
  5. Narayan, Kirin (1992). Storytellers, saints and scoundrels: folk narrative in Hindu religious teaching. Motilal Banarsidass Publ. p. 27. ISBN 978-81-208-1002-0.
  6. Blackburn, Stuart H. (2006). Print, Folklore, and Nationalism in Colonial South India. Permanent Black. p. 174. ISBN 978-81-7824-149-4.
  7. Zvelebil, Kamil (1974). Tamil Literature. Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. pp. 271–272. ISBN 978-3-447-01582-0.
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