Nivedhana Pandian (KCL) - 2025-26 Students
Nivedhana.pandian@kcl.ac.uk

Veterinary, Versified, Vernacular: Translation and Tamil Modernity in the Works of V.P. Subramania Mudaliar

Nivedhana’s doctoral research examines the life and writings of V. P. Subramania Mudaliar (1857–1946), a veterinary officer, translator, poet, and public intellectual active in the Madras Presidency. Through his diverse body of work, including veterinary manuals, literary translations, educational writings, and historical essays, the project investigates how scientific, literary, and administrative knowledge circulated between colonial institutions and Tamil intellectual networks during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In tracing Mudaliar’s movement across multiple authorial roles, the research demonstrates how translation, print, and government service became infrastructures through which new forms of Tamil intellectual authority were negotiated in this period. In doing so, the project reconceptualises the making of colonial modernity by demonstrating how Tamil intellectuals imagined and articulated a distinctly Dravidian vision of the modern through literature, science, translation, and public debate.

In a broader sense, the project contributes to histories of medicine, translation studies, and South Asian intellectual history by recovering the role of vernacular textuality in shaping modern scientific and literary discourse. In doing so, it highlights the importance of vernacular archives for understanding how knowledge was produced and circulated, beyond colonial institutions and binary framings of colonial modernity.

Principal Supervisor: Prof. Javed Majeed