Growing up, most Tamils including me, have read about the many Avvaiyyars—traditionally, elderly women who were wise counsels to kings. I fondly remember the story from the Madurai-Pazhani region, featuring the Avvai of the ‘sutta pazham, sudadha pazham’ fame, where Lord Murugan teaches Avvai about the richness of Tamil vocabulary with riddles and puns. However, what I didn’t know and learned from The Tamils: A Portrait of a Community by Nirmala Lakshman is that there is an ongoing Avvai festival in the Viswanatha Swamy temple in Vedaranyam in Nagapattinam district, to celebrate the many Avvais of Tamil Nadu.
Through the book, Lakshman beautifully brings out how historically and to this day, celebrations of the Tamil community—whether by villages, or specifically by temples—have always, by design, been inclusive. Lakshman picks up on these, and throws light on such little-known festivals that continue to this day.