The Heritage of India Series. The Sacred Kural or the Tamil Veda of Tiruvalluvar

The resemblance of the thought and diction of Tiruvalluvar to the great master-x THE SACRED KURAL pieces of the Bible struck me forcibly and I thought that if any portion of the vigour of the Kural could be presented in English it could only be by adopting the phraseology and the terms of expression of the English version of the Hebrew and Greek Veda.' V. V. S. Aiyar has certainly succeeded in [...] The importance of the Tolkapftiyam for the Kural lies in the fact that it is the first Tamil literary work for which a date can be found and the date of the Kural depends to some extent upon the date fixed for the To/kiiAAiyam. [...] SOUTH INDIA IN THE DAYS OF TIRUVALLUVAR The uncertainty of date will not markedly affect our conception of the conditions of the Tamil country in the days of our author because the literature describing that period whatever it may be belongs to the same time as Tiruvalluvar. [...] We may think of the period as reaching from the second to the fifth century A. C. There is an extensive literature describing the life of the people and the state of the country during these centuries. [...] The broad leaves of the lily growing near the rivulet caught by the long vine of the cane which grows near the banks of the tank and has small thorns like the surface of a rasp are moved by the fitful gusts of the north wind and look like the bellows which are blown in the smithy and grow tense and lax alternately.8—Ahan.