Colombo, July 8: Prof Karthigesu Sivathamby, who unlike many Sri Lankan Tamil intellectuals and litterateurs, did not flee from the war-torn country but stayed to serve Tamil literature and the Tamil people through his writings, lectures and cultural campaigns, died here on Wednesday after a prolonged illness. He was 79.
An internationally recognised scholar, Sivathamby went beyond literature to make seminal contributions to the revival of Lankan Tamil drama and folk arts of the Tamils of the North and East.
An incisive commentator on social conditions in the Tamil areas of Lanka, Sivathamby had a fine historical sense, often viewing the past and the present from a Marxist perspective. A staunch believer in the theory that Tamil is a classical language like Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, he tried hard to get Western scholars to accept the antiquity of Tamil.
He wholeheartedly welcomed the Tamil Nadu government’s efforts to get the Indian government to recognise Tamil as a classical language. Recognising his contributions, the TN government had bestowed on him the Thiru Vi Ka award.
An expert on the Dravidian movement in TN, he wrote on its past and contemporary relevance, and encouraged his students at the Jaffna and Eastern universities to study aspects of Tamil revivalism in Lanka.
Sivathamby was one of the few Tamil litterateurs who were bilingual. He wrote extensively and elegantly in English. He was an unabashed Tamil nationalist but without being antagonistic to other linguistic, religious and ethnic groups in the island. Despite his liberal political stance, he was barred from attending the World Tamil Conference in Thanjavur in 1995.
–Agencies