Lawyer at Large

This was a mail that I received from my uncle yesterday that contains a link to a compilation of Pre-1947 Asian authors in which my Great-Grandfather's works are also catalogued:

Indo-Anglian Literature: Lala on the Net

Click on this hyperlink and check both under "Drama" and "Fiction
works by individual authors" .... look for Nagarajan, Krishnaswamy:
http://www.lib.washington.edu/Southasia/guides/pre1947.html
Please share with other members of our family.

I think growing up we knew we were living with a legend!

Love
(Signed)

This has made me as proud as a peacock in the rain. With due respects to all the people who have helped me become a better writer and thinker, I daresay that had I had the chance to interact with my Great-Grandfather, I am sure my literary interests would have been better moulded. I have chanced to read quite a few of his works - his short-stories and his autobiography. I can recollect having marvelled at his mastery of the language then; his erudition still sometimes has me in thralls. After reading almost all his works, I think I will do well to say that he was one of the very few who wrote the English language like the fastidious Britisher without attempting to sound British in his thoughts and retaining his innate Indianness. His writings, to me, exhibit that kind of poise and honesty.

This is an excerpt of a mail that I had written to one of my English Professors last summer:

Dear Sir,

I write to you with more gusto than usual for this holiday has been extremely eventful. Even as I returned home, I stumbled upon my cousin who was leaving the very night. The meeting proved to be serendipitous for I was able to wrest out of her my great-grandfather's autobiography. He was a lawyer at Pudukkottai, a district abutting Trichirapoly (which is in South India, famous as an industrial centre for BHEL). He was, I have chanced to hear from many a relative - distant and near, a lawyer with a facile tongue, and his popularity, the faithful vehemently adhere till today, was on comparable terms with the Maharajah of Pudukkottai. Right from my childhood, eulogistic tales of his have been thrust upon me and I am only hoping, against my better senses, that they have not swept me off my feet.

But, I was more attracted to his natural propensity and his felicity of the English language. One of the more fortunate few to have studied under British pedagogues, he appears to have taken after them quite naturally in thoughts and demeanours. The other day I went through his autobiography, written in three parts. It is an original manuscript - meticulously typewritten and off-white with time's imprints. Being one of a literary bent, I daresay, even the very smell of the old parchments and the scripts of the Olevetti typewriter (now obsolete, with the advent of the computer) have held me in thralls.

Though it is only evident that he has written this with the ambition of giving vent to his literary presumptions, to give him his due, he has also mentioned that he hopes that this book will serve to open all his descendants to their legacy. And I am glad that I read this manuscript and I shall consider myself beholden to getting the manuscript published.

- posted by Dileepan @ 10:06:00 pm

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