Life, Scholarship, and Missions

Born Xavier Nicholas Stanislaus on 2 August 1913 in Karampon, near Kayts (Ūr kāvaṟtuṟai) in the Jaffna district, he later took the name Xavier S. Thani Nayagam after becoming a Roman Catholic priest. “Thani Nayagam” translates as “lone hero.” His parents were Naganathan Stanislaus and Cecilia Bastiampillai; his paternal grandfather, Thaninayaga Mudali, came from Delft Island (Neduntheevu). He studied at St. Anthony’s College, Kayts, and then at St. Patrick’s College, Jaffna (1920–1922), receiving an English-medium education.

From 1934 to 1939, he resided at the Pontifical Urban University in Rome, earning a Doctor of Divinity degree with his dissertation The Carthaginian Clergy. Ordained a priest in Rome on 19 March 1938, he traveled widely across Western Europe, learning Italian, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese alongside Latin and Greek, establishing the polyglot foundation that underpinned his later scholarly career.

Arriving in South India in 1940, he served at St. Joseph’s High School in Vadakangulam (Tirunelveli) and began studying Tamil systematically with local pandits. From 1945 to 1947, he conducted research at Annamalai University under the guidance of S. Somasundara Bharati, earning a Master of Letters (M.Litt.) degree with his thesis Nature in Ancient Tamil Poetry.

From 1952 to 1961, he served as a Lecturer in Education at the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya. During this time, he pursued a second doctorate at the University of London Institute of Education, awarded a Ph.D. in 1957. In 1961, he was appointed Professor and Head of the Department of Indian Studies at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur. He also taught as a Visiting Professor at the Sorbonne and the University of Naples.

In 1952 in Tuticorin, he founded the Tamil Literature Society and launched Tamil Culture, an English-language quarterly. In Lisbon in 1950, he identified the 1554 Cartilha (Luso-Tamil Catechism) — the first book printed containing an Indian language. On 7 January 1964 in New Delhi, alongside Jean Filliozat, Kamil Zvelebil, and V. I. Subramaniam, he co-founded the International Association for Tamil Research (IATR). In April 1966, he organized the First International Conference-Seminar of Tamil Studies in Kuala Lumpur.

In April 1980, he delivered the Thanthai Chelva Memorial Lecture in Colombo on Research in Tamil Studies. He passed away in Jaffna on the evening of 1 September 1980. At the 5th World Tamil Conference in Madurai (1981), a commemorative statue was unveiled in his honour, and the University of Jaffna conferred a posthumous doctorate.