V. Kanakasabhai

Visvanatha Kanakasabhai Pillai
Born	1855
Died	1906
Occupation	Historian, lawyer

Visvanatha Kanakasabhai Pillai (1855–1906) was an Indian lawyer, historian and Dravidologist of Sri Lankan Tamil descent. He was the first person to attempt a chronology of ancient Tamil Nadu. He was also one of the first people to deduce the references to a long-submerged legendary continent, Kumari Kandam, in texts such as Silappadhikkaram.

Kanakasabhai was born in Madras Presidency in 1855. His ancestors hailed from Mallakam, Jaffna in Ceylon. Kanakasabhai's father V.Visvanatha Pillai, author of Tamil-English dictionary, from Mallakam.To keep alive his connections with Ceylon, Viswanatha Pillai married a woman from Jaffna.

Kanakasabhai graduated in arts from Presidency College, Madras and joined the Indian Postal Service. Like his father, he married a Tamil of Sri Lankan origin.

Kanakasabhai was a lawyer but developed a keen interest in Tamil history and after practising for a few years, he left the profession and became a full-time historian.

From 1895 onwards, Kanakasabhai published a series of articles in the Madras Review about a long submerged land that lay to the south of Cape Comorin. These theories of his were based on ancient Tamil and Buddhist sources. These papers were subsequently published in his book The Tamils Eighteen Hundred Years Ago.

Three years later, in an editorial in the Siddhanta Deepika, Nallaswami Pillai hinted that Lemuria was the long lost land of Kumari Kandam.

In 1904, Kanakasabhai published his magnum opus, The Tamils Eighteen Hundred Years Ago. Dedicated to Sir S. Subramania Iyer, the book was made up of sixteen chapters, each of which examined the life, culture, geography, trade, religion and philosophy of the ancient Tamil country based on the descriptions in two ancient Sangam epics, the Silappatikaram and the Manimekalai. The book is considered to be a classic and as one of the first notable efforts to research the history of Sangam period Tamil Nadu.

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