P. V. Ramaswami Raju

Posts in The Copybook credited to ‘P. V. Ramaswami Raju’

Panruti Vallam Ramaswami Raju (?-1897) was born in Madras, the son of a Government Inspector of Salt, and educated at Presidency College, graduating from Madras University in 1871. After serving as an Inspector of Sea Customs and as Principal of Pachaiyappa’s High School in Kanchipuram, Ramaswami Raju joined the Inner Temple in London in 1882 (aged about thirty) and was called to the bar in 1885, but struggled financially, which drove him to write for a living. He had already written two plays, Lord Likely (1875) and Urjoon Sing (1876), and translated Shakespeare into Tamil for the Madras Vernacular Literature Society; now he published two collections of folktales, Tales of the Sixty Mandarins (1886) and Indian Fables (1887), teaching Indian languages meanwhile at the Universities of Oxford and London. At some unknown date, he returned to Madras to practise as a barrister, earning a formidable reputation and considerable wealth. His final work, a lengthy Sanskrit and English poem Rajangala Mahodyanam: or, the Great Park of Rajangala, was unfinished at his death in 1897.

1

The Goat and the Lion by P. V. Ramaswami Raju

A herd of goats is threatened by a pride of lions, and it falls to one brave billy to face the danger alone.

PV Ramaswami Raju published a collection of Indian Fables in 1887, shortly after he was called to the Bar and while he was teaching Indian languages at Oxford University and later at London. His fables are a creative blend of tradition and imagination: this one tells how one wily old goat saved the whole herd with an audacious bluff.

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2

The Glow Worm and the Jackdaw by P. V. Ramaswami Raju

In this fable from India, a sly little insect teaches a jackdaw that all that glisters is not necessarily edible.

William Cowper’s ‘The Nightingale and the Glow-Worm’ told how a glow-worm persuaded a hungry bird to spare his life because light and song complement each other so beautifully. In the following Indian fable by Ramaswami Raju (playwright, London barrister and Oxford professor of Telugu), the hard-pressed glow-worm does not have such dainty material to work with.

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