Short answers, pulled from the story.
The British Crown took over administration from the East India Company before the beginning of the 20th century. This transition caused literacy levels in South India to rise rapidly and allowed Brahmins to reap huge advantages from the reward-for-merit policy.
One faction preferred an increased mixture of Sanskrit words with Tamil while the other favored reducing Sanskrit words to the barest minimum. The first group believed such fusion raised the quality of the language whereas the second argued that Sanskrit-origin words made Tamil lose its individuality.
Bishop Robert Caldwell published his Comparative Study of the Dravidian Family of Languages in the mid-1800s. He classified words in Dravidian tongues by their linguistic roots for the first time and distinguished them from Indo-Aryan equivalents.
Socio-political movements emerged under figures like E. V. Ramasami and Iyothee Thass organized resistance against established hierarchies. K. N. Sivaraja Pillai, Maraimalai Adigal, Bharathidasan, V. Kanakasabhai, and L. D. Swamikannu Pillai further fueled this political awakening across the region.
Tamil scientists achieved global recognition during the 20th century when C. V. Raman won international acclaim for his work on light scattering. Mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan made groundbreaking contributions to number theory while Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar became a Nobel laureate in astrophysics.