Thirukkural
திருக்குறள்
Also Kural, Muppal, The Tamil Veda.
Poetry Tamil Probably between the third and the sixth century
What it is
The Thirukkural is a work of thirteen hundred and thirty couplets by Tiruvalluvar on how to live, and it is the one Tamil text that every Tamil political and religious tradition claims. It names no god, no caste, no place and no king. It is addressed to a person deciding what to do. Its compression is extreme: each couplet is seven words, four in the first line and three in the second, and it is held that nothing in Tamil has ever been said more briefly.
Its shape
Three books, the muppal: Aram, virtue, with thirty eight chapters; Porul, wealth and statecraft, with seventy; and Inbam, love, with twenty five. One hundred and thirty three chapters of ten couplets each, making one thousand three hundred and thirty. The Porul section on government is the longest and reads as a manual for a ruler; the Inbam section is a dialogue of lovers and is startlingly different in register from what precedes it.
What it argues about
These are not settled texts
What the Kural is has been argued about for a century and the argument is political. Jains claim Valluvar, pointing to the opening invocation and the emphasis on ahimsa and on not eating meat. Saivas claim him. Christian missionaries from Beschi onward found parallels and some argued for Christian influence, which is not now taken seriously. The Dravidian movement claims him as a secular Tamil ethicist outside the Vedic tradition entirely and put his statue at Kanyakumari. The text itself refuses to settle it by naming nothing. That refusal is either its great achievement or an accident of transmission, and Tamil Nadu has not stopped arguing about which.
Episodes worth knowing
Seven words
A kural is a couplet of exactly seven metrical feet, four in the first line and three in the second, and the form allows no padding. The most famous of them says that whatever the virtue of a life of renunciation, the householder who does his duty well is greater. Another says that there is no profit in learning that is not practised. The brevity is why they are memorised: Tamil schoolchildren learn them by the hundred, and politicians quote them, and the couplet form means a quotation is always complete.
The chapter on not eating meat
Chapter twenty six, Pulaal Maruthal, argues against eating meat in ten couplets, one of which says that if a man asks how flesh can be eaten, the answer is that it cannot be, by anyone who understands that it was made from the body of another. The chapter is the strongest evidence offered for Jain authorship. Tamil Saivas read it as consistent with their own tradition. The Dravidian reading treats it as ethical rather than sectarian. The same ten couplets support all three cases, which is the Kural’s situation in general.
Whose telling
There is no single text
- Parimelalhagar, thirteenth century
- The standard commentary, Vaishnava in outlook, and the one most editions print; it shaped how the text has been read for seven hundred years.
- Beschi, 1730
- The Italian Jesuit Constanzo Beschi made the first European translation, of the first two books, into Latin.
- G. U. Pope, 1886
- The verse translation into English that carried the text abroad; Pope is buried with a line from it on his gravestone.
- Dravidian readings
- Periyar and the self respect movement read it as a secular Tamil ethics independent of the Vedic tradition, and the Kanyakumari statue is from that reading.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- Tamil Nadu
- Taught in schools, quoted in the assembly, printed in government offices, and claimed by Jain, Saiva and Dravidian readings alike.
- Kerala
- Read in translation and studied in the Tamil speaking districts of Palakkad.
- Sri Lanka
- Taught in the Tamil schools of the north and east as a core text.
Connected to
Arts
Festivals
Temples