Among the languages now spoken in India, Tamil has the longest continuous literary history, some of the oldest records going back two thousand years or more. This fact, among others, makes it an important member of the Dravidian family, in which it holds second place to Telugu from the point of view of numbers of speakers. Tamil is now spoken by not less than 35 million people, mostly in Southern India and in Ceylon, though there are significant minorities in Malaysia, the West Indies and Africa. This book, a reader for non-Tamil-speaking students of the language, consists of thirty-two representative extracts from post–1947 prose writings, with full grammatical and cultural notes, and a vocabulary. The selection illustrates the variety of styles used in modern Tamil writing. The passages are arranged in order of difficulty, and each has a brief introduction in English.