Devaneya Pavanar

Devaneya Pavanar (also known as G. Devaneyan, Ñanamuttan Tevaneyan; 7 February 1902 – 15 January 1981) was an Indian scholar who wrote over 35 research volumes on Tamil language and literature.

Additionally, he was a staunch proponent of the "Pure Tamil movement" and initiated the Etymological Dictionary Project primarily to bring out the roots of Tamil words and their connections and ramifications with Nostratic studies.

Gnanamuthu Devaneyan Pavanar was a Tamil professor at Municipal College, Salem, from 1944 to 1956.

From 1956 to 1961, he was the head of Dravidian department at Annamalai University.

He was a member of the Tamil Development and Research Council, set up by the Nehru government in 1959, entrusted with producing Tamil school and college textbooks.

In his 1966 Primary Classical language of the World, he argues that the Tamil language is the "most natural" (iyal-moḻi) and also a proto-world language, being the oldest (thon-moḻi) language of the world, from which all other major languages of the world are derived.

He believed that its literature, later called Sangam literature and usually considered to have been written from 200 BCE and 300 CE, spanned a huge period from 10,000 to 5,500 BCE.

Mainstream linguists, geologists and historians do not subscribe to his theories.

In the preface to his 1966 book The Primary Classical Language of the World he wrote:

There is no other language in the whole world as Tamil, that has suffered so much damage by natural and human agencies, and has been done so much injustice by malignant foreigners and native dupes.

The general belief that all arts and sciences are progressively advancing with the passage of time, is falsified in the case of philology, owing to the fundamental blunder of locating the original home of the Tamilians in the Mediterranean region, and taking Sanskrit, a post-Vedic semi-artificial composite literary dialect, the Indian Esperanto, so to speak, for the prototype of the Indo-European Form of Speech.

Westerners do not know as yet, that Tamil is a highly developed classical language of Lemurian origin, and has been, and is being still, suppressed by a systematic and co-ordinated effort by the Sanskritists both in the public and private sectors, ever since the Vedic mendicants migrated to the South, and taking utmost advantage of their superior complexion and the primitive credulity of the ancient Tamil kings, posed themselves as earthly gods (Bhu-suras) and deluded the Tamilians into the belief, that their ancestral language or literary dialect was divine or celestial in origin.

In a chapter entitled Tamil more divine than Sanskrit, Pavanar gives the reasons why he judges Tamil to be "more divine" than Sanskrit, arguing for "Primary Classicality of Tamil", he enumerates :

The Central Plan Scheme for Classical Tamil of the Centre of Excellence for Classical Tamil recommends

From 1974, he was director of the Tamil Etymological Project, and he acted as president of the International Tamil League, Tamil Nadu.

(U. Tha. Ka.).

The Chennai District Central Library is named after Devanaya Pavanar and is located at Anna Salai, Chennai.

Pavanar's Vadamoli Varalaru argues that hundreds of Sanskrit words can be traced to a Tamil origin, and at the same time he insisted that pure Tamil equivalents existed for Sanskrit loan words.

He claimed that Tamil is a "superior and more divine" language than Sanskrit.

In his view the Tamil language originated in "Lemuria" (இலெமூரியா Ilemūriyā), the cradle of civilisation and place of origin of language.

He believed that evidence of Tamil's antiquity was being suppressed by Sanskritists.

Pavanar's timeline for the evolution of mankind and Tamil is as follows:

Devaneya Pavanar composed many musical pieces (Isaik kalambakam) and many noteworthy poems, including the collection of Venpa. The title Senthamiḻ Selvar was conferred on him by the Tamil Nadu State Government in 1979, and he was also addressed as Dravida Mozhi nool Nayiru ("Sun of Dravidian languages").

The literary works and books of Pavanar have been "nationalised" by the Government of Tamil Nadu in the course of the "Golden Jubilee year of National Independence" (2006).

This means that the copyright for Pavanar's work is now owned by the state of Tamil Nadu, his legal heirs having been compensated financially.

posthumously: