Though Tiruvalluvar lived about 2000 years ago, it does not seem he is dead. He is a contemporaneous presence in the Tamil country, influencing men’s thoughts and urging them to bring their conduct into greater and greater conformity with the high ideals heset before them. None would disagree that he has shaped Tamil literature as no other Tamil has done. He has dominated the intellectual and literary landscape of Tamil Nadu, and never since his time has any man risen to the moral and spiritual height that came to him. There was no one like him before or since. Except, perhaps, Kambar. He came to think, surely, of mankind as including persons who spoke other languages than Tamil. He taught in the same language as Plato or Aristotle, Confucius or Rousseau did in respect of ideas, in respect of conceptions of right and justice.
What did he think of mankind? And what does it matter what he thought of mankind? It matters because therein resides the quintessence for prosperity and peace in the social order, a quest, which still eludes us. If he was right, the rest of us were wrong. Tiruvalluvar’s mind is so extraordinary that we would feel grateful and thrilled to see human life through his eyes. He contemplates the grand spectacle of the phenomenon of Man in its earthly and cosmic contexts and sees it in all its totality in the clear day-light of unclouded faith. He locates whatever makes for disharmony in personal relationships and maps out a detailed code of conduct, which would bring about harmony within the individual and harmony without. He focusses on the emotional reverberations caused by human conduct on every aspect of human relationship, between, say, son and father, husband and wife, citizen and State, and Soul and God. As one visualises the architectonics of the Tirukkural with its 133 Chapters and 1330 Kurals, and as one grasps it whole, one is reminded of Arnold’s description of a Poet:—
Leaned on his gate, he gazes, tears
are in his eyes, and in his ears
the murmur of a thousand years,
before him he sees life unroll,
a placid and continuous whole.
Not only does Valluvar see life unroll as a continuous whole, but also does he see with the eyes of a Seer what impedes the further evolution of Man and how the impediments can be removed. He has eyes that miss nothing, eyes that can twinkle with humour and wit, sarcasm and mischief, eyes which glow with righteous indignation and sparkle with certain and lofty wisdom, eyes which can make men fidget and women blush, eyes which grow misty with tears for the poor and sting the wicked.
Apart from his effort to embrace the human condition in its totality, he communicates his luminous insights in the pure perfection of poetry. He achieves supreme emotional effects, sometimes through drama and sometimes through lyric. He is a cunning technician, who, by prodigious self-restraint and artistic vigilance, super-charges his words with meaning and achieves an incredible terseness and an irreducible density. His commentators have, therefore, to squeeze every word and persuade it to yield its last drop of meaning. The success of each commentator has depended also upon the expertise, which he has brought to bear upon the original Dr. Albert Schweitzer in his book on “Indian Thought and its Development,” appraises the Tirukkural and observes, “There hardly exists in the literature of the world a collection of maxims, in which we find such lofty wisdom”. M. Ariel, the great French Savant, in a letter to Burnouf, published in the Journal Asiatique (November-December 1848) speaks of Tiruvalluvar’s great work as
“a masterpiece of Tamil literature, one of the highest and purest expressions of human thought”. Again, he says:—“That which above all is wonderful in the Kural is the fact that its author addresses himself, without regard to castes, peoples or beliefs, to the whole community of mankind; the fact that he formulates sovereign morality and absolute reason; that he proclaims in their very essence, in their eternal abstractedness, virtue and truth; that he presents, as it were, in one group, the highest laws of domestic and social life; that he is equally perfect in thought, in language and in poetry, in the austere metaphysical contemplation of the great mysteries of the Divine Nature as in the easy and graceful analysis of the tenderest emotions of the heart”. The Italian Jesuit missionary, Fr. Beschi (De. 1742) translated most of the Kurals into Latin, and in his commentary, he compared the Kurals of Tiruvalluvar with the maxims of Seneca. The celebrated Englishman, Dr. G. U.
Pope translated the Kural into English and published the same in 1886. In his introduction to the English translation, Dr. Pope has compared the Tirukkural to Propertius and to Martial and the Latin elegiac verse. In his commentary on the Kural Dr. Pope has quoted analogous passages from authors like Horace, Aeschyles, Dante, Shakespeare, Brownning, Wordsworth, Manu, Burgin and Catullus and adds that what Archbishop Trench said of Saint Augustin is equally true of Tiruvalluvar:—“He abounds in short and memorable, and if I might so call them, epigrammatic sayings, concentrating with a forceful brevity, the whole truth, which he desires to impart, into some single phrase, forging it into a polished shaft at once pointed to pierce, and barbed that it shall not lightly drop from the mind and memory”.
Poetess Avvayar, who is reputed to have been the sister of Tiruvalluvar and who must consequently have watched Valluvar in his songsmithy, says in a Tamil song:—“Valluvar bores an atom, pours the seven seas into its cavity, and cutting the atom, offers its cross-section to us in the shape of the Kural”. * Rightly has Dr. G. U. Pope hailed Tiruvalluvar as the “Bard of Universal Man” and here are the songs in which Dr. Pope celebrates the universality of Tiruvalluvar:
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