Master Valluvan, the Long-Misunderstood Tamil Mentor - Part One

Part One “The Kurral owes much of its popularity to its exquisite poetic form. A kurral is a couplet containing a complete and striking idea expressed in a refined and intricate metre. No translation can convey an idea of its charming effect. […] The brevity rendered necessary by the form [composed in the Venpa metre] gives an oracular effect to the utterances of the great Tamil ‘Master of the sentences.’ They are the choicest of moral epigrams. […] Tiruvalluvar is generally very simple, and his commentators very profound.” Rev. G.U. Pope, Former Fellow of Madras University [Pardon these futile measly words from your great Potiya height: they can hardly belittle your true worth.] Under what leaky hutment roof by stamped-mud floors trembling clair-oscuro straw-wick kuttuvilakku on the stark anvil of crisp phrase and sparse syntax by the raging nama-nir rhyming brine at Mayilapur’s S.Thomé sandy doors while peacocks danced to your innate pulsating chimes have you chipped away at uncut gems Those the Yavanas brought with the monsoons or such as your sea-daring captain friend Elela-Cinkan’s Even those the Christian missionaries preached in daredevil enticement after St.Thomas fell to a vel stuck in his bosom or of those like you who were stamped underfoot Caste in cast-iron strictures Priest only to the proclaimer paraiyar drum-beaters The warp and woof of intricately woven venpa verse elevating your weaving clan to fresh artistic heights YET in the humbled ways of your birth on whose steps have you pitched your ears whose wisdom have you had to pilfer filter whose ways have you had to ape whose mere thoughts have you then had to set aright ennoble and remould into inextinguishable lines Or had you tread the ahimsa path of gentle-foot Jains Treading gently the earth for fear of loping boot pains (Continued in Part Two)