Kural Read online

  Tiruvalluvar

  THE KURAL

  Translated from the Tamil

  with an introduction

  by

  P.S. Sundaram

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Book I VIRTUE

  (i) Proem

  1. In Praise of God

  2. Rain

  3. Ascetics

  4. Virtue

  (ii) Domestic Virtue

  5. Domestic Life

  6. A True Wife

  7. Sons

  8. Love

  9. Hospitality

  10. Affability

  11. Gratitude

  12. Impartiality

  13. Self-control

  14. Right Conduct

  15. Faithfulness

  16. Forbearance

  17. Envy

  18. Covetousness

  19. Slander

  20. Vain Speech

  21. Doing Evil

  22. Social Obligation

  23. Charity

  24. Fame

  (iii) Ascetic Virtue

  25. Kindliness

  26. Vegetarianism

  27. Penance

  28. Impropriety

  29. Thieving

  30. Truthfulness

  31. Wrath

  32. Not Hurting Others

  33. Non-killing

  34. Impermanence

  35. Renunciation

  36. Realization

  37. Yearning

  (iv) Fate

  38. Fate

  Book II WEALTH

  (i) The State

  39. The King

  40. Learning

  41. Ignorance

  42. Hearing

  43. Wisdom

  44. Faults

  45. Elders’ Help

  46. Mean Company

  47. Action

  48. Strength

  49. Time

  50. Place

  51. Selection

  52. Employment

  53. Kindred

  54. Slackness

  55. The Unswerving Sceptre

  56. Misrule

  57. Terrorism

  58. Compassion

  59. Espionage

  60. Energy

  61. Sloth

  62. Manliness

  63. Fortitude

  (ii) The Limbs of the State

  64. Ministers

  65. Persuasiveness

  66. Honest Dealing

  67. Efficiency

  68. Modes of Action

  69. Envoys

  70. To Move with Kings

  71. Mind Reading

  72. Knowing an Assembly

  73. Facing an Assembly

  74. The Land

  75. Forts

  76. Wealth

  77. Army

  78. Valour

  79. Friendship

  80. Choosing Friends

  81. Old Friends

  82. Bad Friends

  83. False Friends

  84. Folly

  85. Conceit

  86. Malice

  87. Easy Targets

  88. Strategy

  89. The Enemy Within

  90. Irreverence

  91. Uxoriousness

  92. Public Women

  93. Abstinence

  94. Gambling

  95. Medicine

  (iii) Miscellaneous

  96. Lineage

  97. Honour

  98. Greatness

  99. Character

  100. Courtesy

  101. Useless Wealth

  102. Nicety

  103. Social Service

  104. Agriculture

  105. Poverty

  106. Begging

  107. The Dread of Begging

  108. The Base

  Book III LOVE

  (i) Furtive Love

  109. Fascination

  110. Hints

  111. The Joys of Embracing

  112. In Praise of his Lady

  113. In Praise of the Beloved

  114. Unabashed

  115. Rumours

  (ii) Wedded Love

  116. Separation

  117. Pining

  118. The Eyes’ Longing

  119. Pallor

  120. The Lonely Anguish

  121. Nostalgia

  122. Love Dreams

  123. Evening Sorrows

  124. Wasting Away

  125. To her Heart

  126. Farewell, Reserve!

  127. Mutual Longing

  128. Sign Language

  129. Yearning for Union

  130. Quarrelling with her Heart

  131. Coyness

  132. Lovers’ Quarrels

  133. The Joys of Falling Out

  Footnotes

  Introduction

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE KURAL

  Valluvar, one of the greatest poets in Tamil classical literature, probably lived and wrote between the second century BC and the eighth century AD.

  Some scholars believe that Valluvar belonged to the weaver caste, others think he was the chieftain-king of Valluvanadu in India’s deep south. A third version has it that he was born of a Brahmin father and a Harijan mother. His birthplace by tradition is held to be Myalpore in the city of Madras where there is a temple dedicated to him.

  There is evidence that Valluvar was influenced by the works of other literary giants of ancient India: Manu’s Dharmasastra, Kamandaka’s Nitisara, Kautilya’s Arthasastra and certain ayurvedic treatises, all of which were written in Sanskrit. Be that as it may, Valluvar’s genius lay in his use of Tamil to create the striking imagery, aphorisms and poetry of the Kural.

  The Kural, comprising 1,330 couplets, deals with the first three of the four purushaarthas, the supreme aims of life: dharma (virtue), artha (wealth), kama (love) and moksha (salvation). However, Valluvar omitted moksha from the Kural because (it has been suggested) if the maxims laid down for the attainment of the first three goals were followed diligently, salvation would follow automatically.

  P.S. Sundaram took degrees in English from the universities of Madras and Oxford. He was a professor of English for nearly fory years. He has written a biography of the noted writer R.K. Narayan and has also translated the celebrated Tamil poet Subramania Bharati into English. He lives in Chennai.

  For my friend V.V. John

  Good friends are like good books—

  A perpetual delight.

  Kural : 783

  Introduction

  The earlier Indologists (with only a few exceptions) associated India exclusively with the Vedas, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Hitopadesa and the poet Kalidasa. This was a result of the discovery of Sanskrit by the British and German savants in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries which led to something like a second Renaissance in the world of learning. Sanskrit was hailed as the mother of all the Indo-Germanic languages; or at any rate their eldest sister. Sir William Jones described it as a language “of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either”.

  However, what these scholars soon came to see was that India was not limited culturally to the Aryan north. The Dravidian south was actually older, in the sense that prior to the Aryan invasion the civilization which spread throughout the country was almost certainly Dravidian. A great deal of this pre-Aryan civilization still exists in the south, and traces of it have been preserved in the earliest surviving Tamil poetry of the Sangam age.

  An American missionary, Dr M. Winslow, the author of an admirable Tamil-English Dictionary brought out in 1862, perhaps had Sir
William Jones in mind when he made the same claim for Tamil that Jones had made for Sanskrit eight decades earlier. It is, he said

  not perhaps extravagant to say that in its poetic form Tamil is more polished and exact than Greek, and in both dialects (common and literary) with its borrowed treasures more copious than Latin. In its fulness and power, it more resembles English and German than any other living language.

  Tamil among all the Indian languages, next only to Sanskrit, has the oldest literary records. But unlike Sanskrit it is a living language. Its continuity is such that a Tamil of today will have less difficulty in understanding the Tamil poetry of the seventh, eighth or the ninth century than an Englishman of today will have in understanding Beowulf or The Battle of Maldon.

  The name Tirukkural comprises two parts, tiru and kural. Tiru corresponds to the Sanskrit Sri and means “sacred, excellent, beautiful”. As an honorific meaning ‘Hon’ble’ it is preferred by many in the south to the otherwise universally Indian ‘Sri’. Kural may be explained as something which is “short, concise, abridged”. It is applied as a literary term to “a metrical line of two feet, or a distich or couplet of short lines, the first of four and the second of three feet”. These definitions are Dr Winslow’s and correspond to both the traditional and the actual.

  Though the work is popularly known by the form in which its stanzas have been written, its earliest admirers and perhaps even the author himself referred to it as the muppaal, meaning three divisions; this definition has to do with the organization of the book into three themes: Virtue, Wealth and Love. These are the first three of the four purushaarthas, the supreme aims in life, which every man must seek, the fourth being moksha or the release from the unending cycle of birth and death. It is said in explanation of the omission of this fourth, the summum bonum, that the proper pursuit of the other three will inevitably lead to the fourth, which in any case admits of no description. There is also a precedent for such an omission in the Santiparva of the Mahabharata which mentions only the trivargas, the three divisions.

  Valluvar, the author of the Kural, also invariably has the honorific ‘Tiru’ as a prefix to his name. Whether Valluvar was the poet’s name or that of the sub-caste to which he belonged (determined by the occupation or vice-versa) is not certain. Valluvan was a name associated with a weaver. It was also the name given to a drummer proclaiming a king’s orders on an elephant-back. The r in Valluvar instead of the n as in Valluvan is a plural indicating respect.

  Those who could not accept that a non-Brahmin could have produced a work of such great merit are credited with the invention of a legend that Valluvar was the illegitimate son of a Brahmin father and a Harijan mother. His birthplace was by tradition held to be Mylapore, a part of Madras, where there is a temple built to honour him. But, in recent years, Dr S. Padmanabhan has propounded a theory based on epigraphical and other evidence that Tiruvalluvar was probably born in what is now the district of Kanyakumari, in the extreme south of Tamil Nadu, and was perhaps the chieftain-king of Valluvanadu who probably, like Mahavira and Gautama Buddha, turned from royal personage to spiritual thinker. Mylapore might well have been the place of his death rather than his birth.

  It is not easy to fix the date of the Kural. Scholars place it anywhere between the second century BC and the eighth century AD. Vaiyapuri Pillai, the author of the scholarly History of Tamil Language and Literature, suggests that Valluvar probably was a contemporary of the Saivite saint-poet Appar (AD 600). There are also those who think that certain sentiments in the Kural—for instance, the sovereign quality of forgiveness and the supremacy of love for all things created—might have been the result of Valluvar’s leanings to the preachings of the followers of St. Thomas, who apparently came to India a few years after the crucifixion of Christ. But both Jainism and Buddhism are older than Christianity and the most valuable part of their teachings is compassion. It is therefore, not necessary to attribute whatever is best in the Kural to foreign influence.

  There is evidence in the Kural of Valluvar’s indebtedness to Manu’s Dharmasastra, Kamandaka’s Nitisara, Kautilya’s Arthasastra and certain ayurvedic treatises all written in Sanskrit. Valluvar might also have been acquainted with Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra, if it existed in his time. In his delineation of the romantic pangs of a lover, he is more influenced by the earlier Tamil conventions than by anything he may have found in Sanskrit literature. The proportion of pure Tamil words to those borrowed from Sanskrit or modelled after Sanskrit is much greater in the Kural than in any devotional poetry of the Saivite and the Vaishnavite saints of the Bhakti school. But, it is less than those used in the poetry of the Sangam period.

  For the text of the Kural in its complete form, we were until recently indebted to Parimeelazhahar’s reproduction with his own commentary on it. The date of this work is said to be AD 1272. There is an ancient verse which says that there were nine other commentators on the Kural in addition to Parimeelazhahar.* Of these, the commentaries of Manakkudavar, Pariperumal, Parithiar and Kalingar are now available. Manakkudavar probably belonged to the eleventh century and his commentary is now considered to be the earliest. The word arrangement of Manakkudavar is often found to be more satisfactory than that of Parimeelazhahar. His division of words makes better sense without any sacrifice of the metrical requirements. But Parimeelazhahar, who seems to have been a Vaishnavite, as his references to Nammalwar indicate, won encomiums for his wide and deep knowledge of both Sanskrit and ancient Tamil literature, the sharpness of his mind in detecting the errors of earlier commentators, and both the fulness and the brevity of his own comments.

  The text of the Kural with the five commentaries by the above-mentioned commentators shows a surprising similarity. The numbers and the arrangement of the chapters is the same, and the chapter headings are also identical. While Parimeelazhahar begins his commentary on each chapter of the Kural with a justification for its placement in the sequence, Kalingar makes the justification at the end of each chapter. Except for three stanzas in Book III (Love), which in Kalingar’s version are distributed differently, among the chapters in the same book as compared with the other commentaries, the stanzas are all the same in the various commentaries. However, within each chapter there is a variation in the arrangement of the ten couplets making up the contents of that chapter. Each commentator was presumably led by his own sense of logic in the arrangement. As regards difference in the text, according to M. Shanmugham Pillai**, who has studied the matter carefully, in the 1,330 couplets there are only about 305 variations.

  It is a matter of some debate as to whether Valluvar himself was responsible for all these stanzas and their arrangement in 133 chapters, each consisting of exactly ten stanzas, or whether it was the work of some later editor. The rigid adherence to the number ten has often resulted in the same idea appearing in different words in order to make up the prescribed number of stanzas, for instance, couplets 8 and 10 under Chapter I of the Proem. In cases where a topic has not been exhausted in ten couplets, it has been spread over several chapters as for example in ‘Friendship’.

  A question often raised is whether the ‘Proem’ was a part of the Kural as it was first composed. V.V.M. Raghaviyengar, a great scholar, was of the view that the four chapters which make up the Proem are in conformity with a prescription in Tolkaapiyam, a treatise on grammar and the oldest surviving Tamil classic. The third book on Love in the Kural certainly owes more to the Tolkaapiyam than to Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra.

  A string of fifty-three verses called the Tiruvalluvarmalai contains praise from various admirers of Valluvar and the Kural. Their literary value lies in the light they throw on the groupings of the Kural’s stanzas. Book III for example is described in one of these verses as consisting of not two divisions as in Parimeelazhahar’s version but three. But the total number of stanzas mentioned by many of these authors remains the same—1,330. Since all surviving manuscripts contain these verses and attribute them to one single author viz., Valluvar, he has as m
uch right to his identity as the author of the Kural as Homer to his as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

  Ancient writers in Tamil enumerating works of antiquity placed the muppaal among the eighteen kilkanakku—Tamil classical literature that was written after the golden age of Sangam literature. In their reckoning, muppaal was just one among these numerous writings, practically all of which were didactic. It may be for purely metrical reasons that the muppaal is mentioned after five other works headed by the Naladiyar. But neither on the basis of intrinsic merit, nor from the point of view of chronology can it come after the Naladiyar, which seems even to a casual reader a work derived from the Kural. The tendency to moralize is perhaps more ingrained in the Eastern psyche than the Western. But the Kural is miles ahead of the didactic pieces with which it was associated, because of the way it comes home to our business and bosoms, its author seldom passing on second hand what he has not himself felt in his blood and felt along his heart.

  The Kural was among the earliest of the Tamil classics to be translated by the Christian missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant. Fr. Beschi of the Society of Jesus (1700–1742) translated it into Latin; though it is likely that he worked only on the first two books, the manuscript of which “the only one in existence”, according to G.U. Pope (1820–1908) is in the India Office Library, London. Francis White Ellis, of the East India Company, who came to India in 1796 (d. 1819) as a ‘writer’ and rose to become the Collector of Madras, translated 120 couplets, sixty-nine in verse and the rest in prose. His translation and commentary have been published by the University of Madras and run into nearly 390 pages. Amongst others who translated the Kural into English are Dr Pope, the Rev. W.H. Drew and the Rev. John Lazarus. There are also versions in the French (Ariel) and German (Graul).

  The great attraction of the Kural especially for the missionaries was its ethical content. Its first chapter is in praise of God, but the praise is universal in content and thus could apply to any God, Hindu, Jain or even Christian. There are some indications in the Kural of Valluvar having been a Jain, but Parimeelazhahar, who seemed to have been a Vaishnavite, didn’t appear to have found anything heretical in the verses.

  The Kural’s concern is primarily with the world, a world which is the world of all of us. There is very little here of Advaita philosophy, still less of the transcedental. It is not the work of a mystic but of a down-to earth man of the world, concerned with the home and the community. But while Valluvar is eminently practical he is no opportunist. He is a statesman not a politician, a realist who is not a cynic.