Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman reviews Nirmala Lakshman’s book ‘The Tamils: A Portrait of a Community’

The Union Minister for Finance Nirmala Sitharaman reviewed Nirmala Lakshman’s book ‘The Tamils: A Portrait of a Community’ for ‘The Book Review’ journal

Nirmala Lakshman’s new book The Tamils: A Portrait of a Community is considered more than just a political history of the community. It has been hailed as a layered effort to shine a spotlight on the epigraphy, archaeology, architecture and culture of the people from southern India whose recorded historical existence has been for more than a millennium.

Lakshman is currently Publisher and Chairperson of The Hindu Group of Publications and was earlier Joint Editor of the paper. She founded and edited The Hindu Literary Review, conceptualised and created Young World, India’s only children’s newspaper supplement, and developed several other feature sections of The Hindu. She launched The Hindu’s annual literature festival and continues to curate it.

Lakshman has a PhD in postmodern fiction, and has written a book on Chennai, Degree Coffee by the Yard, and edited an anthology of contemporary Indian journalism, Writing a Nation.

Among a slew of reviews on her latest book is one by the Finance Minister, Government of India, and senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader, Nirmala Sitharaman, who in 2025 created history by becoming the first person to table the union budget eight consecutive times.

Sitharaman, in her article, in The Book Review, an India-based peer-reviewed academic journal covering reviews of books on various subjects, opens with a well-known character from Tamil literature — the Sangam poet, Avvaiyyar. “Growing up, most Tamils including me, have read about the many Avvaiyyars — traditionally, elderly women who were wise counsels to kings. I fondly remember the story from the Madurai-Pazhani region, featuring the Avvai of the ‘sutta pazham, sudadha pazham’ fame, where Lord Murugan teaches Avvai about the richness of Tamil vocabulary with riddles and puns. However, what I didn’t know and learned from The Tamils: A Portrait of a Community by Nirmala Lakshman is that there is an ongoing Avvai festival in the Viswanatha Swamy temple in Vedaranyam in Nagapattinam district, to celebrate the many Avvais of Tamil Nadu.” 

Sitharaman also mentions that Lakshman highlights another festival — the Meenpudi Thiruvizha, a celebration of people congregating to catch fish in the southern villages of Tamil Nadu. She however adds, that the classical examples that we associate with “justice and fairness in the generational memory of the Tamil people is curiously missing” referring to King Manuneedhi Konda Cholan (250 BCE) but that Lakshman brings to life a lesser-known incident. “This is about the Pallava King Mahendra Varman I (600-630 CE), who through his Sanskrit play Mattavilasa Prahasana critiques judicial corruption in a tongue-in-cheek way, through the character of the housemaid.” 

“Such lucid stories colour Lakshman’s approach to writing about the Tamils as a community. She does not saddle us with burdensome footnotes, instead concocting a rich and delightful mix of her field work, oral history, archaeological surveys, and vivid interviews with domain experts as well. While she chooses to arrange her book chronologically and with broad compartmentalisation, each chapter is also self-contained, making access to the book that much easier,” she says.