study of the primary texts of both Christianity and Hinduism. When there was a conflict as to Percival's version and another competing translation, Arumugam traveled to Madras to defend Percival's version. In 1848 he founded his own school and finally parted company with Percival. Navalar believed that the Christian missionaries should be viewed as a gift from Shiva to help awaken his community to discover their own dharma path (puram) from "which they had departed" and away from the path of the "barbaric Europeans" (purappuram), states Hudson. Background information Tamil people are natives in South India and in Sri Lanka. In the early centuries of the common era, Buddhists and Jains from northern and eastern regions of India influenced South India. The Tamil Hindu literati responded with their own literature, particularly with the bhakti saints, the Nayanars and Alvars. By the 12th century CE, the Tamils had an extensive network of temples, religious literature and pilgrimage sites dedicated to Shaivism and Vaishnavism Of these, the Shaiva samayam (religious tradition) was most influential in the Jaffna region. They held the Vedas and Agamas to be the bedrock of their beliefs. Navalar was born and raised in this background. The 18th and 19th century Tamils in India and Sri Lanka found themselves in the midst of intrusive Christian missionary activity and their polemics against Hinduism. According to D. Dennis Hudson, Tamil Saivas opposed Christian missions from the earliest days, based on indirect literary evidence. Printing press was not available to the Hindus in colonial era South Asia, and the Shaiva community used their oral tradition and handwritten notes for anti-missionary literature. Once Hindus gained access to printing presses, they mass-produced religious literature to condemn Christian propaganda in Jaffna and Chennai (then Madras) in the same way that Christian missionaries had used mass-produced literature to attack Hinduism. Arumuga Navalar was one of the first Tamils who became adept at this information war, and to undertake as his life's career the intellectual and institutional response of Saivism to Christianity in Sri Lanka and India. The 19th century Protestant missionaries from England and America in Jaffna believed that Hindu Shaivism was "evil" and in the struggle God and the Devil, they began to use publications such as The Morning Star to reveal the "falsity" of Hindu Shaivism and highlight texts such as the Skanda Purana in their schools for children. This angered the Shaiva community,