Kural Read online

  Valluvar was obviously well-acquainted with the Dharmasastra of Manu, but while to the latter, varna (caste) was not less important than ashrama (a stage in life), Valluvar makes no distinction between man and man on the basis of the caste into which he is born. “Call them Brahmins”, he says:

  who are virtuous

  And kind to all that live.

  According to him there were indeed two classes of men, the noble and the base. But birth, he felt, had nothing to do with either. The noble, he said, would help others even with his bones. Whereas the base, ruled only by fear and greed, are completely worthless and in a crisis will only sell themselves.

  Valluvar knew that virtue was supremely important, but also realized that without wealth, it was seldom practicable. “Will that hunger come again”, wails the poor man, “which almost killed me yesterday?” Renunciation he said, was fine, but without householders the ascetics would starve and a good householder was not less worthy of honour than a sanyasi. “Ploughmen are the earth’s axle-pin: they carry all the world”. According to him, they only lived who raised their own food: the rest were “parasites and sycophants”. Learning, he said, made one a citizen of the world, but a shy scholar was useless, and one must live one’s learning.

  Valluvar had evidently read Kautilya’s Arthasastra, but there is nothing Machiavellian in his manual for princes. He said that it was not his spear but the sceptre which bound a king to his people—and to the extent that he guarded them, his own good rule would guard him. A king, he said, should choose the right servants after careful trial, and once he had chosen them he should give them his trust. According to Valluvar, to prefer personal loyalty to knowledge and diligence was to court disaster. Nepotism, he believed, was both evil and unwise. He felt that constant interference with the work of the subordinates would only hamper justice.

  Valluvar’s praise of fame, of daring, of knowing how to wait, scorn delights and live laborious days marks him off as an admirer of energy and action.

  Be born if you must for fame: or else

  Better not be born at all.

  The great do the impossible

  The mean cannot do it.

  A world conqueror bides his time

  Unperturbed.

  Valluvar was no ascetic. Napolean, at any rate as First Consul, would have, we may be sure, won his enthusiastic approval!

  While the second book up to chapter 96 has traditionally been thought of as meant for kings, whole chapters of it, e.g., Learning, Hearing, Friends etc., apply as much to the man in the street as to a prince on his throne. Whether all these chapters were conceived and carried out by one man who by his literary skill gave it a place in the Tamil language as significant as the Arthasastra in Sanskrit, may well be doubted. For all we know, some of these chapters at least may have been later accretions and not all of them by the same man. However, they have a remarkable resemblance to one another in their approach to the theme on hand and the verbal execution.

  There were two things on which the putative author felt very strongly. The first was ingratitude: “All other sins may be redeemed, but never ingratitude”. The second, meat-eating. Valluvar couldn’t understand how anyone could wish to fatten himself by feeding on the fat of others. His picture of all the unslaughtered animals bowing to the man who has spared them recalls, in its quaintness, Bernard Shaw’s picture of the cows, the sheep, the hens and the fish that he had not eaten, following his bier when he died, a more pleasing sight certainly than their going two by two into Noah’s ark. Valluvar’s Jainism (if we are to accept this theory) was probably responsible for his uncompromising stand on this issue, but the actual explanation lies perhaps in his senstivity and reverence for all living things.

  As regards wine or toddy, Valluvar has a chapter against drunkenness, but when he writes:

  Love is sweeter than wine—its mere thought

  Intoxicates,

  one wonders how such an idea could have occurred to a complete teetotaller.

  Valluvar’s insistence on commonsense and moderation is a constant refrain in the book. His appeal was always to do or think what was patently beneficial. Why, he wondered, did men stop acquiring knowledge when they knew that learning opened all doors? When one liked pleasant words oneself, he felt, how could one use harsh words to others? He asked, does an envious man need enemies? Isn’t his envy enough? Or again: You who sacrifice honour to put off death, how long can you put it off?

  Whenever one reads Valluvar’s thoughts on men of learning, of accomplished speakers, of friends, of children, of a good wife, the pages actually glow. The third book which Drew thought “could not be translated into any European language without exposing the translator to infamy”, is a paean to youthful love, its ardours and fulfilment and is as moving as Romeo and Juliet, as spotless as the Song of Solomon. Its shy and romantic refinement has little in common with the sensuousness of Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda, still less with the clinical sexuality of the Kamasutra.

  This sage and serious prince of courtesy can on occasion be deadly in his irony. Two instances should suffice:

  The base are like the gods: They also do

  Whatever they like.

  Sweet indeed is a fool’s friendship

  For when it breaks there is no pain.

  We must not forget that Valluvar was as much a poet as a teacher. His metaphors came as naturally as the sunrise or the koel’s song, fresh and artless:

  The Learned lacking expression

  Are flowers without scent.

  The hurt fire caused will heal within,

  But not the scar left by the tongue.

  The lute is bent, the arrow, straight: judge men

  Not by their looks but acts.

  The lotus rises with the water,

  And a man as high as his will.

  Great wealth like a crowd at a concert

  Gathers and melts.

  Swift as one’s hand to slipping clothes

  Is a friend in need.

  A boor’s great wealth goes bad

  As milk in a can unscrubbed.

  A Kural stanza consisting of two lines has always been printed following all the ancient manuscripts with four feet in the first line and three in the second. Fr. Beschi who did so much to bring the Kural to the notice of Europe, pointed out that actually many of the Kural’s stanzas had three feet in the first line and four in the second. This is evident when one notices the rhyme as well as the meaning of a verse. Professor E.J.P. Kuiper of the Kern Institute, Leiden is of the view that in as many as 119 of the 380 stanzas of Book I of the Kural, the correct way of printing the stanzas should be three feet in the first line and four in the second.

  As conventionally, Professor Kuiper might well describe the Kural stanza as a halting measure, literally sesquipedalian, “one-and-a-half”. But there is nothing sesquipedalian about Valluvar’s verses in the dictionary meaning of the term—i.e., cumbrous and pedantic.

  On the other hand, his words are simple, carefully chosen and beautifully set, like captain jewels in a carcanet. Valluvar knew the value of words and didn’t waste any. He took delight in rhyme and repetition, pun and alliteration and exploited them to the full to drive home a point

  Cling to the One who clings to nothing

  And so clinging cease to cling.

  is typical in its English of much of the brevity and the wordplay of the Kural.

  Lytton Strachey said of Alexander Pope, countering Matthew Arnold’s complaint that Dryden and Pope were not classicists of poetry but of prose because they lacked a true criticism of life, that Pope’s criticism of life was his heroic couplet. It may be said of Valluvar even more truly that his criticism of life is the Kural in both senses of the term, the book and the stanza. As in Pope’s heroic couplet, the admirable thing in Valluvar’s Kural is the sense of sobriety and commonsense, of balance and proportion. Valluvar is no bard but a man talking to men, a cultured and civilized man talking to those who can appreciate courtesy and good bre
eding. Every kural is a balance, a pair of scales held up for the reader to scan and judge. “Look at this and that”, he seems to say, “and decide”. The abrupt ending of the second line almost seems to suggest that it is for the reader himself after looking at both the sides of the scale to make his choice, and bring the transaction to an end. The readers, as with Dryden, are the jury. The writer only puts the case.

  Valluvar has been translated by several people but there is no English translation of the Kural which is entirely satisfactory. The most devoted and learned of the translators, Dr Pope, chose to render the Kural in lines that extend right across the page like pythons. If ever an Alexandrine was needless, these surely are. Valluvar, though he lived centuries ago, is not half so ‘antique’ as the metre in which G.U. Pope has rendered his song is ‘stretched’. Rajaji, the ablest and wisest of India’s statesmen, brings to his translation his incisive clarity, but his prose is less concerned with Valluvar the poet than with Valluvar the thinker and teacher. Other translations are mostly pedestrian, when they are not sheer doggerel.

  It was said of Valluvar by one of his early admirers that he pierced the mustard seed and poured into it the seven seas. Avaiyar, the grand old dame of Tamil poetry, improved on this by substituting the Tamil word for ‘atom’ in place of the one for a ‘mustard seed.’ Those who translate the Kural at length do not do it the least justice, for its soul is brevity and with it least is most just. The poetry, to adapt Wilfred Owen, is in the pithy.

  Book I

  VIRTUE

  (i) Proem

  1. In Praise of God

  1.

  A begins the alphabet

  And God, primordial, the world.*

  2.

  What use is that learning which does not lead

  To the blessed feet of Pure intelligence?*

  3.

  Long life on earth is theirs who clasp

  The glorious flower-embedded feet.*

  4.

  Never harmed are those who clasp the feet

  Of the one beyond likes and hates.

  5.

  The delusions caused by good deeds and bad

  Shall never be theirs who seek God’s praises.*

  6.

  Long life is theirs who tread the path

  Of him who conquered the five senses.*

  7.

  None shall be free from carping care

  Save those at the feet beyond compare.

  8.

  The feet of the Lord with the Virtue-wheel

  Will help to cross the sea of birth.*

  9.

  Palsied and useless the head unbowed

  At the feet of the God of eightfold virtue.*

  10.

  The ocean of births can be crossed by those

  Who clasp God’s feet, and none else.

  2. Rain

  11.

  Rain which sustains the world

  Should be deemed life’s elixir.

  12.

  To the hungry, rain supplies

  Both food and itself as drink.

  13.

  Should rain fail, hunger will rack

  The wide earth sea-girt.

  14.

  Ploughmen will not plough

  If rain withholds its plenty.

  15.

  It is rain which ruins men; it is also rain

  Which lifts them up.

  16.

  If raindrops drop dropping

  There won’t be a blade of grass.

  17.

  Even the wide sea will be less its self

  If the cloud depriving it meanly holds back.*

  18.

  If the heavens dry up, the very gods

  Will lack festival and worship.

  19.

  The vast world rainless, one may bid adieu

  To charity and penance.

  20.

  If the world cannot do without water

  Neither can aught without rain.

  3. Ascetics

  21.

  All codes extol the excellence

  Of disciplined self-denial.

  22.

  To recount an ascetic’s greatness

  Is to number the world’s dead.

  23.

  Their greatness alone shines bright

  Who, knowing both, choose renunciation.*

  24.

  He sows the seed of bliss who rules

  His five senses with wisdom’s goad.

  25.

  To his strength who rules his five senses

  Indra, the sky-king, bears witness.*

  26.

  The great do the impossible:

  The mean cannot.

  27.

  This world is his who knows for what they are

  Taste, sight, touch, sound and smell.

  28.

  The scriptures of the world proclaim

  The potent utterance of the great.*

  29.

  The wrath of those on virtue’s hill

  Though brief,* must have its way.

  30.

  Call them Brahmins who are virtuous

  And kind to all that live.

  4. Virtue

  31.

  What better investment than virtue which yields

  Both wealth and release to the living?

  32.

  No greater gain than virtue

  Or worse loss than forgetting it.

  33.

  By all means possible, in all ways open

  Practise virtue.

  34.

  A spotless mind is virtue’s sum

  All else is empty noise.

  35.

  Envy, greed, wrath and harsh words—

  These four avoided is virtue.

  36.

  Defer not virtue, and you will find in her

  The day you die an undying friend.

  37.

  Why talk of virtue’s way? Only behold

  The palki-bearer and the one who rides.*

  38.

  Be good, don’t waste a day; and so

  Block the way to rebirth.

  39.

  Virtue alone is happiness; all else

  Is else, and without praise.

  40.

  The thing to do is the virtuous deed,

  The thing to avoid vice.

  (ii) Domestic Virtue

  5. Domestic Life

  41.

  A true householder is a steadfast friend

  To the other three orders in their virtuous paths.*

  42.

  For the ascetics, the needy and the dead

  The best help is the householder.*

  43.

  The manes, the gods, guests, kin and self

  Should be one’s five chief concerns.*

  44.

  His line will endure who shuns ill

  And shares what he eats.

  45.

  Love and virtue are the flower and fruit

  Of domestic life.

  46.

  What does he gain elsewhere who treads

  The pure householder’s path?

  47.

  A householder by instinct scores

  Over others striving in other ways.

  48.

  His is the greater penance who helps penance

  Not erring in his worldly life.

  49.

  Domestic life is virtue, especially when

  It is free from blame.*

  50.

  A model householder on earth

  Is a god in heaven.

  6. A True Wife

  51.

  A true wife she whose virtues match her home

  And who lives within her husband’s means.

  52.

  Where wifely virtue is lacking

  All other glory is nil.

  53.

  With a good wife, what is lacking?

  And when she is lacking, what is good?

  54.

  What can
excel a woman

  Who is rooted in chastity?

  55.

  She whose husband is her only God

  Says, “Rain” and it rains.

  56.

  A true wife never tires guarding

  Herself, her husband and their name.

  57.

  What cage can guard a woman’s chastity

  Except itself?

  58.

  The woman who gets her husband’s love

  Gains the joys of heaven.*

  59.

  Not his before scoffers a leonine gait

  Whose wife scorns a good name.

  60.

  A good wife is called a boon to a house

  And good children its jewels.

  7. Sons

  61.

  We know no blessing better worth our while

  Than intelligent children.*

  62.

  No harm will befall in all seven births

  One who begets blameless children.*

  63.

  A man’s offspring are called his property

  As their properties spring off him.*

  64.

  Sweeter than nectar is a man’s food messed up

  By his child’s small hands.

  65.

  Sweet to the body is a child’s touch

  And to the ear its words.

  66.

  “The flute is sweet”, “The lute is sweet”, say those

  Who never heard their children lisp.

  67.

  The good one can do one’s son

  Is to place him in the van of learned men.

  68.

  A wise son gives joy not only to his father

  But to all the world.*

  69.

  A woman rejoices at the birth of a son—

  But even more when he is praised.

  70.

  The service a son can render his father

  Is to make men ask, “How came this blessing?”

  8. Love