One of the most versatile and innovatory of contemporary Tamil writers, Sundara Ramaswamy, fondly known as SuRaa, brought about a new wave in Tamil literature. Despite the fact that he received no formal education, he was adept in Tamil, Malayalam, English and Sanskrit. His creative genius manifested itself uniquely through his work, cutting across genres – short stories, novels, poems, essays, criticism, translation and polemic. His short-stories are watersheds in the history of modern Tamil literature, marked by conscious experiments with forms. He wrote poetry under the pseudonym Pasuviah.