Ramanuja Kavirayar

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Ramanuja Kavirayar (1780, Ramanathapuram – 1853, Madras) was a Tamil savant and poet. Living in Madras, he dominated the world of Tamil letters and had several eminent Tamil scholars as his students.

Ramanuja Kavirayar pioneered the work of bringing Tamil classics into print for the first time, and wrote commentaries on some of them. He was also a poet. His greatest service, however, like that of Minakshisundaram Pillai, was as a teacher of Tamil. He trained a band of fine native Tamil scholars and was guru or munshi (the term then current to denote language teachers) to many of the European Tamil scholars in Madras between 1820 and 1853.