Text · Tamil ethical classic
Tirukkuṛaḷ
One thousand three hundred and thirty couplets in seven words each, attributed to Valluvar and generally dated between the third century BCE and the fifth century CE, arranged in three books on virtue, wealth and love. It names no god, no place and no king, and it has been claimed as Hindu, Jain and Buddhist by turns, which is a consequence of what it leaves out. It is the most translated Tamil work and the most quoted, in a language where being quotable is the test.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
Worth knowing
Its refusal to name a religion made it usable by everyone: Christian missionaries printed it, Dravidianists made it a secular scripture, and Leo Tolstoy quoted it in a letter that reached Gandhi.
The date and the author's religious affiliation are both long-standing disputes; the text itself gives no internal evidence for either.
Connections (2)
- TransmissionLeo Tolstoy
Tolstoy read the Tirukkuṛaḷ in translation and used its couplets as epigraphs in “A Letter to a Hindu”, the six-thousand-word answer he wrote in December 1908 to Tarak Nath Das, who had asked him to endorse armed Indian independence. Tolstoy refused, and argued that only the law of love could free India. The Kural suited that argument exactly: an ancient text on virtue that names no god, no nation and no king, which a Christian anarchist in Tula could quote without qualification.
- Devotional corpus onMohandās Karamchand Gandhi
Gandhi came to the Tirukkuṛaḷ through Tolstoy rather than through Tamil, and quoted it afterwards — an ancient Tamil work reaching a Gujarati in Johannesburg by way of a Russian in Tula. The chapter on not killing, and the Kural's insistence that virtue is conduct rather than belief, sit close to what he was assembling; he later encouraged its translation. The route matters as much as the text: this is Indian ethical writing returning to Indian political use through a European intermediary.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Kural”. G. U. Pope's 1886 translation; Kamil Zvelebil, The Smile of Murugan; Norman Cutler on the Kural's reception.
Open Tirukkuṛaḷ in the repository →