Nanjil Nadu · Eastern Coastal Plains
People
| Name | Years | Field | Known for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ayya Vaikundar | 1809–1851 | Religious founder | Born at Swamithope, he founded what became Ayyavazhi, teaching against caste distinction and the ritual order that enforced it, and gathering a following across south Travancore. The movement produced its own scripture, the Akilathirattu Ammanai, its own worship centres and its own practice, and it remains concentrated in this district. |
| Marshal A. Nesamony | 1895–1968 | Politician | Led the campaign of the Tamil-speaking taluks of south Travancore to be transferred to Madras State, and is generally regarded as the reason Kanyakumari district exists in its present form from 1 November 1956. He was later a member of the Lok Sabha from the district he had helped create. |
| William Tobias Ringeltaube | 1770–1816 | Missionary | Established the London Missionary Society at Mylaudy from 1806, beginning the mission school and dispensary network that shaped the district's unusually high literacy and its large Protestant population, and whose successors were central to the upper-cloth agitations. |
| Theodore Howard Somervell | 1890–1975 | Surgeon and mountaineer | A member of the 1922 and 1924 Everest expeditions who then spent most of his working life as a surgeon at the mission hospital at Neyyoor, developing it into one of the largest hospitals in south India at the time. The Everest career is the footnote here; the operating theatre is not. |
| Sundara Ramaswamy | 1931–2005 | Writer | A central figure of Tamil literary modernism, who lived and wrote at Nagercoil and set his work in this landscape. He also translated Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai's Chemmeen into Tamil — a writer of this region carrying the neighbouring region's novel across the language line in person. |
| Nanjil Nadan | born 1947 | Writer | A Tamil novelist and short-story writer who took the region's own name as his pen name and wrote its speech, caste texture and food into Tamil fiction. Awarded the Sahitya Akademi prize for Tamil in 2010. |
| Jeyamohan | born 1962 | Writer | A prolific Tamil novelist and essayist from this district who also writes and is read in Malayalam, and whose fiction repeatedly takes the bilingual condition of this stretch of coast as its subject rather than its background. |
| Swami Vivekananda | 1863–1902 | Monk | Not of this region, but the reason a large part of it is on the map. His stay on the offshore rock in 1892, at the end of a walk down the length of the country and before he left for Chicago, is the event the memorial and much of modern Kanyakumari were built around. |
People from Nanjil Nadu who shaped its history, arts, science, sport and public life. (8)