AMU mourns the sad demise of noted linguist Padmashri Dr Vellayani Arjunan

ALIGARH  : The faculty members and students at the Department of Modern Indian Languages, Aligarh Muslim University expressed a deep sense of sorrow and grief on the sad demise of noted linguist, Malayalam scholar and former faculty member of AMU, Padmashri Dr Vellayani Arjunan (90) who passed away on May 31 in Thiruvananthapuram.

Prof. T.N. Satheesan, a professor of Malayalam and former Chairperson, Department of Modern Indian Languages, AMU said that Dr Arjunan was the first Malayalam Teacher at AMU who joined as a lecturer in Malayalam in the Department of Hindi and South Indian Languages in 1961.

“It is a great loss to the comparative Indian Literature. Dr Arjunan had been working for the last sixty years in the field of Comparative Indian Literature introducing Malayalam literature to Hindi speakers and vice versa,” he said.

Born in Kerala in 1933 Dr Arjunan completed his education in Kerala and later obtained three D.Litt degrees from Jabalpur University, Agra University and Aligarh Muslim University. He supervised 20 research scholars and published more than 100 research papers and articles. He served two terms at the State Institute of Encyclopaedic Publications as chief editor from 1975 to 1988 and as director from 2001 to 2004.

He had authored forty books in different genres including poetry, short story, essays and literary criticism, and his books were prescribed as textbooks in Kerala schools from 1959 onwards.

He received Padmashree from the Government of India in 2008.