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The postman knocked

* At last, thanks to a member of the family, Vijay Swaminadhan, I'm able to tie up the loose ends today in the Santanam-Swaminadhan story (Miscellany, May 15). He tells me that Pandit Santanam married Krishna Vedi from the then United Provinces. She was the daughter of Atma Ram Vedi, a renowned Arya Samaj preacher. Her mother was the head of a Sanskrit patasala for girls and a vaid. The Santanams had five daughters.

Apart from Sulochana and Anasuya, there were Champak, Malati and Madhuri. Champak married Amrit Khanna, a nephew of the late Maharaja of Burdwan. Khanna was in the Indian Army's Corps of Engineers, then moved on to work in Britain. Malati married Nirmalya Chander Sen, a grandson of Keshub Chander Sen, founder of the breakaway Brahmo Samaj of India. And Madhuri, as already mentioned, married M. L. Sondhi, who before becoming a Parliamentarian was in the Indian Foreign Service and was later a Professor at Jawarhalal Nehru University. Reader C. A. Reddi adds that Santanam's Lakshmi Insurance is still in business in Pakistan; I wonder under what name?

* Prof. Thomas Trautmann from the University of Michigan, U.S., has sent me a wealth of information on Francis Whyte Ellis (Miscellany, April 10). Writes Trautmann, "Ellis's most important accomplishment was the discovery of the Dravidian Language family, a proof of which appeared in 1816, thirty years before Robert Caldwell's A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family of Languages, which consolidated Ellis's findings, and forty years before Sir William Jones proposed the concept of the Indo-European Language family." The proof was in Ellis's `Introduction' to A. D. Campbell's A Grammar of the Telooggoo Language. In that Introduction, Ellis states that Tamil, Telugu and Kannada are NOT descended from Sanskrit but constitute a separate language family; despite Sanskrit loan words in the three languages, they have a core vocabulary of related words that is not Sanskrit in origin. Ellis goes on to state that Malayalam, Tulu, Kodagu and Malto (a North Indian tribal language) are also members of the same family, but that Marathi and Sinhalese, though influenced by the Dravidian language family, are Sanskritic languages. Ellis, Trautmann adds, was largely responsible for the planning of the College of Fort St. George and the founding of the Madras Literary Society. His treatise on mirasi (freehold) rights, Trautmann points out, was written in collaboration with his sheristadar(head clerk) B. Sancaraya (I wonder whether there are any descendants who could add to this). The book derived much from local traditions and historical inscriptions. More mundane is the information that while he was a judge in Tanjore in 1806, Ellis was transferred to `Machilipatam' after he had irked the Raja by sentencing to prison one of the Royal minions who had been extorting rents by force. Nothing changes, does it?

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