Noted multi-hyphenate Tamil scholar and orator Solomon Pappaiah breathed his last at his residence in Madurai on Friday owing to age-related ailments. He was 90. Known for speeches that blend rich Tamil knowledge with witty remarks, he played a crucial role in passing on timeless Tamil values to every generation.
Solomon Pappaiah was born to Sundaram and Bakkiam on February 22, 1936, in Sathangudi near Madurai. He displayed academic passion right from a very young age and went on to obtain his Bachelor's from the prestigious Madurai American College and Master's from Thiagarajar College. He began delivering speeches in his 20s while working as a Tamil professor at The American College. He served as a lecturer in the college in 1961 and retired as the Head of Department in 1994.
Apart from educating students at his college, his popularity on Pattimandram (debate) stages and later on television became his defining contribution to Tamil, and he too made complete use of every platform he got to take Tamil to posterity. Just as his speeches spanned mediums, his notable writings, like commentaries on Kamba Ramayanam and Thirukkural, too have never stopped with the pages. It is rare to find a Thirukkural app without his commentary. It would not be an overstatement to say that youngsters touched by his Tamil erudition may well have taken his scholarly yet easy-to-understand language to modern devices, through which Solomon Pappaiah continues to teach Valluvar's lessons to students like this reporter. He has also penned works on Poet Kambar, Agananooru and Puranaanooru.
No festival in Tamil Nadu is complete without the Pattimandram (debate) shows he moderates. Tamil, like the divine, has its way of permeating even through testing times. His Pattimandram shows coincided with a time when it was considered that the academicians weren't doing a great job teaching Tamil. This could also be partly attributed to the hyperfocus on subjects that could ensure a 'future,' unlike Tamil. His Pattimandram debates, while retaining levity, discussed every issue under the sun and reignited the community spirit among fragmented Tamils in the post-Globalisation era. The very meaning of the word Pattimandram conveys the debate about culture's ubiquity in ancient Tamil Nadu.
His popularisation of the Pattimandram culture went beyond teaching Tamil. It also reinvigorated the rational and inquisitive spirit of Tamils. His discussions on the questionable actions and episodes involving characters from Kambaramayanam, including its protagonist, Lord Ram, will be fondly remembered in today's highly polarised times, when political extremes on both sides are bent on painting the people of Tamil Nadu as unnuanced representatives of their respective ideologies.
Solomon Pappaiah's love for Tamil can be seen in every vocation he involved himself in, even briefly. An acting career spanning just two to three films, which ends with Rajinikanth and Shankar's Sivaji, still stands to testify that he cannot barter Tamil for whatever the films could offer him. With the infamous disgrace of Sangam literature characters Angavai and Sangavai in the 2007 film and Pappaiah's resultant outburst, he could be easily called one of the earliest critics of Kollywood's colourism when it was considered normal and opened up debates on it. Yet again.
His profound contributions to Tamil literature earned him the titles of Tamil Arignar, Iyal Kalai Arignar, and Kalaimaamani from the Tamil Nadu government in 2000. In 2021, the Government of India honoured his literary excellence with the Padma Shri, a well-deserved recognition of a lifetime devoted to enriching the Tamil language and its literary traditions.
As Tamil, through his command of the language and his mastery of tone, preserved his youth even at 90, it would be fitting to bid farewell to Solomon Pappaiah with John Milton’s lines: “For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime, Young Lycidas, and hath not left his peer. Who would not sing for Lycidas? He knew Himself to sing, and build the lofty rhyme.”
