This 1822 publication is an important example of early Tamil scholarship by one of its most sensitive translators and linguists.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1882.

Indian Linguistic Studies and Translation Studies is a growing discipline internationally in the field of language and literary studies. It will interest scholars and researchers of South Asian literature, Culture Studies, and British Imperialism. Editors and contributors are foremost experts in the field

In Writing Tamil Catholicism: Literature, Persuasion and Devotion in the Eighteenth Century, Margherita Trento explores the process by which the Jesuit missionary Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi (1680-1747), in collaboration with a group of local lay elites identified by their profession as catechists, chose Tamil poetry as the social and political language of Catholicism in eighteenth-century South India. Trento analyzes a corpus of Tamil grammars and poems, chiefly Beschi’s Tēmpāvaṇi, alongside archival documents to show how, by presenting themselves as poets and intellectuals, Catholic elites gained a persuasive voice as well as entrance into the learned society of the Tamil country and its networks of patronage. This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 840879.