A fellow TamBram writes about it; https://nereview.com/article/the-trials-of-subu-vedam.
The word Brahmin is mentioned 4 times in the non-paywall foreword.
Subu’s father was an academic, a physics professor and materials scientist at Penn State, who would have blended seamlessly with my parents’ friends in North Carolina, who were all vegetarian and spoke Brahminical Tamil with its idiosyncratic conjugations and vocabulary.
Dr. V
could not read the content. if it can be enlarged it will be good.
in the meanwhile i liked the reviews of ‘ A tale of two cities’, a never ending quarrel between vadagalai ( northern) and tengalai (southern) iyengars, about interpreting ramanujacharya’s teachings.
https://mylapore.substack.com/p/tamil-iyengarss-quixotic-squabbles?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
from Mylapore enquirer, written by devanathan.
https://mylapore.substack.com/p/tamil-iyengarss-quixotic-squabbles?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
……The philosophical divide crystallized into two distinct schools of thought regarding the nature of human salvation and divine grace. The Vadakalai school, centered around Kanchipuram, turned its gaze northward to the Sanskrit corpus. They argued that liberation required an active, cooperative effort from the human being. This became known as the Markata Nyaya—the Monkey School. Just as a baby monkey must actively cling to its mother’s belly to be saved as she leaps across branches, the human athma (loosely translated as soul) must perform Prapatti (surrender) as an act of conscious will and maintain ritual, caste-based purity as a prerequisite for grace.
Conversely, the Thenkalai school, centered in the deep south around Srirangam, championed the Marjara Nyaya—the Cat School. In this view, the kitten does absolutely nothing; it cries, and the mother cat picks it up by the scruff of its neck and carries it to safety. Grace is unconditional, absolute, and requires no human prerequisite except the total cessation of resistance. To the Thenkalais, requiring human effort to “help” God save the soul was an insult to divine omnipotence.