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.Indeed, Samuel speaks of destroyed manuscripts as the lost, literary children of mother Tamil, drawing on the symbol of Tami×ty, the goddess of Tamil that hasplayed a large role in the revivalist deification of the Tamil language.47Mother Tamil stands weeping and helpless, losing so many literarychildren (ilakkiyap piëëaikaë) to the cruel dance of time, to the fury ofnature, to the heat of fire, and to the floods of swollen rivers.Howmany of her artistic treasures have been lost because of the indifferenceand the superstitions of people on this soil? How many of her literarychildren were sacrificed in the name of the cruelty of men in times ofreligious conflict? How many of her creations of refined Tamil werelost in times of the invasion of others and the spread of outsiders? Howmany of these literary children of Tamil even today are caught in thecreeping hands of death, slowly dying in all the unreachable corners ofvarious foreign countries? This book resulted from my search for theselost texts.48He considers these manuscripts as the products neither of individuals nor ofthe siddhars but of an ethnic, linguistic community unified in the symbol of amother.Speaking in the language of Tamil revivalism, Samuel likens a break in the loss and recovery of medical knowledge 187transmission of manuscripts to a death in the Tamil family.While the reasons forthe loss of manuscripts are both natural and social, he gives primacy to the legacyof foreign impact, because it has not only resulted in the destruction or exportationof manuscripts but has also made Tamils indifferent to these texts.Samuel portrays himself as a good son, a loyal member of a community thathe conceives as a family.His conviction that Tamil language, culture, and litera-ture are equal to any in the world came at a young age, flowing in my blood and inscribing itself deeply in me. 49 He struggles to explain this physiological devo-tion to Tamil, especially given that he grew up in Neyur, a town in the southerndistrict of Kanya Kumari that was a center of the anglicizing project of Christianmissionaries.He contrasts himself not only to his family and childhood acquain-tances but more important to Tamil scholars and local government ministersand authorities who declared that all the valuable Tamil manuscripts had alreadybeen published and that the rest are rubbish. Samuel castigates these people,saying that they win the trust of the people with the words my body is of thesoil and my soul of Tamil, but they subsequently neglect their mother tongue. Their Tamil feeling (tami×uõarvu), Samuel concludes, is the fake deceit of theirwork. 50Samuel describes his own Tamil feeling as emerging from his nostalgicvisions of the traditional past: My heart began to imagine the revolution in knowl-edge that occurred in past society through these palm-leaf manuscripts.Scenes thatI had heard of kids in traditional schools writing with awls appeared often beforemy mental eye.Shadowy visions of great poets taking their awls and writing onmanuscripts, nourishing the garden of Tamil literature, appeared to me.Every timeI saw a palm-leaf manuscript, my mind was intoxicated with joy.But still, I was notable to read clearly the letters written on those manuscripts. 51 Samuel s evocativefantasy of the utopia that was traditional Tamil society is aroused by the mere sightof Tamil manuscripts, manuscripts whose content, he admits, were opaque to him.This juxtaposition of enchantment and ignorance is no coincidence, because theillegibility of the manuscripts to Samuel meant that he could read into them hisown fertile visions.The ambiguity of concealed knowledge gives it the pliancy toaccommodate a variety of shifting contexts and agendas.If unreadable extant manuscripts evoke utopian visions, lost manuscriptsdo so even more, because they symbolize the loss of the original transmission of sid-dha medical knowledge.In his presentation at the Second World Tamil Conferencein 1968, P
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