Dr. P. K. Narayana Pillai is sixty today. Endowed with intellectual qualities of a rare order and a sense of total dedication to academic pursuits, Dr. Pillai has held aloft the torch of sound scholarship through decades of unremitting endeavour. His has not been a rosy path; often he had to play the role of a pioneer and path-finder; and there is no gainsaying the fact that he has scored remarkable success in his chosen field.
Dr. Pillai is traditional, in the true sense, yet he is modern. And the one significant aspect that marks him out from the general stream is this happy synthesis between the traditional and the modern outlooks. He has drunk deep at the perennial springs of Vedic scholar ship; equipped with the insight acquired through constant and systematic contact with the methodology of classical scholarship, he approaches problems of contemporary interest; and here, his analytic mind and scientific training stand him in good stead. Dr. Narayana Pillai, at the age of sixty, stands as a shining example of what a researcher could do in the context of the ever-widening vistas of contemporary scholarship.
It is only in the fitness of things that his students, friends and admirers decided to commemorate his sixtieth birthday. A committee of prominent public men, educationists and men of letters of Kerala under the presidentship of Shri P. S. George, President, Kerala Granthasala Sangham, was organised at a public meeting held at the Y. M. C. A. Hall, Trivandrum, in this connection on 25th May 1970 and a programme was chalked out to create an endowment in the University of Kerala in the name of Dr. Pillai, to publish a commemoration volume of research papers each in English and Malayalam; to unveil a portrait of Dr. Pillai in his parent department and to organise a public meeting to felicitate him on the eve of his Shashtipoorthi for presenting him with the volumes. The present volume of research papers with the significant nomenclature PRATIBHANAM marks the fulfilment of a phase of the programme.
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