Sa Kandasamy (23 July 1940 \u2013 31 July 2020) -Tamil novelist, short story writer, literary critic and documentary filmmaker, Sa Kandasamy wrote his first novel Saaya Vanam at the age of 25, naming it after a village that he had lived in as a child. Now in its twelfth edition, Saaya Vanam is one of the earliest examples of modern Indian literature focussing on environmental issues. Sa Kandasamy\u2019s Visaaranai Commission, which dealt with custodial violence and the police, won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Tamil in 1998, one of several awards and fellowships received by him. Sahitya Akademi published a series of Tamil biographies introduced by him. He wrote extensively for the literary magazine Ka Sa Da Tha Pa Ra, which featured the work of artists, writers, scholars, and translators of all hues. His film Kaval Deivangal documenting the history and techniques relating to traditional terracotta art in South India won the first prize at the Angino Film Festival, in Cyprus, in 1989. \u2018Sa Kandasamy believed in expressing profound ideas in simple words and was not trapped by labels,\u2019 says A S Panneerselvan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u2018Like a lion in the first flush of its golden-maned youth, the forest of giant golden-stemmed bamboos stalked towards them. Why not burn it down? Green shoots and all?\u2019 Thrumming with cicadas and honeybees, bristling with bamboo and tamarind, and redolent of heady illuppai blossoms, here comes a saga of the life-and-death struggle of a lush South Indian jungle. The agent of change is a man who has nothing to lose. Uprooted from the human jungle of caste, clan, and kinship, Singapore-returned Chidambaram hacks, and finally burns his way into the untamed wilderness to make way for sugarcane plantations and a sugar factory. Tamil literature has from the earliest times been infused with an awareness of the natural world. Saaya Vanam, along with this English avataar, vividly reminds us that Tamil itself\u2013like any human speech\u2013is an outgrowth of nature. Says the translator, Vasantha Surya: \u2018It has been my endeavour to show how languages are inseparably intertwined, and derive their nourishment from a shared ground of human experience and imagination.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":9403,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"product_cat":[27,28,102,38,67],"product_tag":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9304","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"product_cat-action-adventure","7":"product_cat-activity-books","8":"product_cat-art-culture","9":"product_cat-cultural","10":"product_cat-store","11":"pa_book-author-arthur-gonzalez","13":"first","14":"instock","15":"featured","16":"shipping-taxable","17":"purchasable","18":"product-type-simple"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.crisscrosssolutions.in\/Vitasta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product\/9304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.crisscrosssolutions.in\/Vitasta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.crisscrosssolutions.in\/Vitasta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/product"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.crisscrosssolutions.in\/Vitasta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9304"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.crisscrosssolutions.in\/Vitasta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/demo.crisscrosssolutions.in\/Vitasta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"product_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.crisscrosssolutions.in\/Vitasta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_cat?post=9304"},{"taxonomy":"product_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/demo.crisscrosssolutions.in\/Vitasta\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product_tag?post=9304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}