> This was because of the monetary denomination of the Indian rupee at the time, where 16 Annas made a Rupee, 12 Kanis made an Anna and 4 Dammidies made a Kani.
I had a vague idea about Annas and never knew about the other two, but I realize have encountered shadows of all of these growing up.
My vague understanding of annas came from 25 paisa and 50 paisa coins being a thing, and being called நாலணா (4 annas) and எட்டணா (8 annas).
Kani I assume is காணி, and finally I understand what Bharathiyar was asking for when he asked "காணி நிலம் வேண்டும்" ("my wish is for meagre land worth a mere Kani").
Dammidi must be தம்படி, and survives mostly as an insult: "தம்படி பெறாது" = "this thing is not even worth a Dammidi".
Thanks. I'd assumed he was going for the humble, ascetic, "I don't need much" intent, but I should have known that isn't Bharatiyar's style! Asking for 1.32 acres fits better with the rest of the poem where Bharati doesn't hold back from expressing his (pretty reasonable) wants.
Extremely humble in this statement. He was hugely influential in statistics (Cramer-Rao lower bound, etc) and somewhat recently his work was also quite relevant to RL, eg with Rao-Blackwellization of gradient estimators.
I had a vague idea about Annas and never knew about the other two, but I realize have encountered shadows of all of these growing up.
My vague understanding of annas came from 25 paisa and 50 paisa coins being a thing, and being called நாலணா (4 annas) and எட்டணா (8 annas).
Kani I assume is காணி, and finally I understand what Bharathiyar was asking for when he asked "காணி நிலம் வேண்டும்" ("my wish is for meagre land worth a mere Kani").
Dammidi must be தம்படி, and survives mostly as an insult: "தம்படி பெறாது" = "this thing is not even worth a Dammidi".