the legend of valluvar and tamil literary history

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Modern Asian Studies 34, 2 (2000), pp. 449–482. 2000 Cambridge University PressPrinted in the United Kingdom

Corruption and Redemption: The Legend ofValluvar and Tamil Literary History

STUART BLACKBURN

SOAS, University of London

This [the Valluvar legend] is one of the traditions which are so repugnant toinveterate popular prejudice that they appear too strange for fiction, and are

probably founded on fact. (Robert Caldwell 1875:132).

If we now recognize that literary history is more than a history ofliterature, it is perhaps less widely accepted that the writing of liter-ary history is an important subject for literary historiography. Yetliterary histories are a rich source for understanding local concep-tions of both history and literature.1 More accessible than archae-ology, more tangible than ethnology, literary histories are culturallyconstructed narratives in which the past is reimagined in the lightof contemporary concerns. Certainly in nineteenth-century India, thefocus of this essay, literary history was seized upon as evidence tobe advanced in the major debates of the time; cultural identities,language ideologies, civilization hierarchies and nationalism were allasserted and challenged through literary histories in colonial India.Asserted and challenged by Europeans, as well as Indians.

The study of the history of Indian literatures, however, is stillstruggling to move beyond the descriptive and chronological, thedating of texts and attributing of authorship, the tracing of influ-ences and movements, the rise of bhakti, the rise of the novel andso on. While these philological wheels slowly turn, recent histori-ography of the colonial period has turned its attention to texts ofthe period, and thus opened up new lines of inquiry into nineteen-century Indian literature. In this study of colonial culture, literat-ure—in its old meaning of ‘that which is written’, including diaries,political tracts, journalism and history—has been brought centrestage, where a study of literary histories can now contribute to bothliterary and historical scholarship.

1 A persuasive statement of this position is Wlad Godzich, The Culture of Literacy(Harvard, 1995). On new approaches to Indian literary history, see Pollock 1995(and other essays in the same publication).

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One virtue of such a new literary history might be as a correctiveto some recent colonial historiography. Combining Foucault’s thesisabout knowledge and power with Said’s critique of colonial know-ledge, a now substantial body of scholarship has argued that theimprint of British colonialism upon Indian languages and literatureswas fundamental and long-lasting. Bernard Cohn’s influential essayson the colonial sociology of India has set in motion a series of studiesof the European pursuit of ethnographic and linguistic knowledge asinseparable from the consolidation of political power.2 Beginningwith the establishment of the colleges at Calcutta, Madras andBombay in the first few years of the nineteenth century, it is claimed,colonial ideology and institutions standardized Indian languages bygrammars and dictionaries, by fixing their scripts (especially throughthe imported technology of print) and by public educational policy,all of which eventually conferred legitimacy on one among severalcompeting varieties of a language (and in the case of Hindi/Urducreated new ‘languages’).3

The impact of colonialism, in this view, was no less profound onthe development of Indian literatures during the nineteenth century.The standardized and legitimized language varieties became theforms promoted by the colonial state for literary expression: a ‘high’Bengali or a ‘high’ Marathi, already sanctioned by colonial policy,became the norm for written literature. Again, educational policyfixed curricula, examinations and degrees and thereby promoted cer-tain kinds of literary expression. In addition, Western literature pro-vided the genre models for the Indian writers throughout the cen-tury, culminating in that pinnacle of literary modernity, the novel.It is striking that most ‘first novels’ in Indian languages were writtenby bilinguals and that most literary histories of Indian languageswere first published in English; in other words, the literary canonsof Indian literatures were established not only in European categor-ies but in a European tongue. In sum, it is argued, this colonialintervention in Indian languages and literatures produced a ‘disloca-tion’ with pre-colonial cultural practices and knowledge. Drawing onHabermas, the argument is that this rupture resulted in a new socio-linguistic hierarchy in which those who did not speak the language

2 See Trautmann 1997 (18–21) for an assessment of Cohn’s influence. Examplesof a post-Saidian colonial historiography of India would include Dirks 1992; Lelyveld1993; Raheja 1996. For the general influence of Orientalism on Indology, see Inden1990; for British attitudes toward Indian languages, see Majeed 1992.

3 See King 1994; Lelyveld 1993.



V A L L U V A R A N D T A M I L L I T E R A R Y H I S T O R Y 451

of power (English) were effectively sidelined and in which the cre-ation of a truly public sphere was rendered impossible.4

Wisely employed, this sociology of the colonial imagination hasmuch to offer to a literary historiography of the period. Such anapproach, for example, would counter the tendency in literary stud-ies to dehistoricize texts and would encourage a study in the colonialperiod of what Pierre Bourdieu has called the ‘literary field’. On theother hand, when driven by such powerful theoretical engines asSaid, Foucault and Habermas, studies of the ‘colonial project’ areprone to overstatement, inflating the power of colonial knowledgewhile underplaying the influence of Indian cultural practices. ‘Rap-ture’, ‘dislocation’, ‘asymmetry’,—catchwords of this scholarship—tend to erect cultural caesurae where transitions, transformationsand adaptions might be more accurate desciptors. Post-colonialtheory, it appears, is ill at ease with pre-colonial sensibilities, espe-cially literary ones.

The evidence presented in this essay suggests that, however power-ful colonialism might have been, it did not create wholesale newknowledges or fields of meaning; rather it influenced change by inter-vening in existing discourses and introducing new conceptual frame-works. If we are to understand the effects and limits of this interven-tion, we require an historically-informed analysis that gives sufficientattention to pre-colonial literary and cultural practices. Severalrecent studies of nineteenth (and eighteenth) century India havebegun to work out just such a new model of analysis.5 Eugene Irsch-ick’s study of nineteenth-century debates over land rights in SouthIndia presents a dialogic model in an attempt to explain the alli-ances that emerged between British and south Indians in con-structing a notion of fixed attachment to the land. Another recentbook that exposes the complexities of British–Indian discourseduring the nineteenth century is Vasudha Dalmia’s study of thenationalization of Hindu tradition. Her book is especially relevantfor the present essay because it proposes an explanatory model(modified from Guha) for the development of a literary cultureunder colonialism and demonstrates the multiple, competing strandsof tradition, including Orientalists and Indian intellectuals of various

4 See Kaviraj 1991.5 For eighteenth-century north and west India, see C. Bayly (1988, 1997) and

O’Hanlon (1997). For nineteenth-century south India, see Dirks 1997, in which hetempers his earlier claims and writes that colonialism can only shift ‘old meaningsslowly, sometimes imperceptively’ (134).




persuasions. Her analysis makes it clear that the construction of aHindi literary canon and a normative brand of Hinduism was notthe creation of a monolithic colonial project but a complicated coali-tion of the reconstructed past, revivalist movements and modernity,including the colonial state.6

The modest scope of the present paper is to focus on the readingsof a single, traditional text and its author as an entry point intoTamil literary history in the nineteenth century. The Tirukkural.(hereafter Kural.) was no ordinary text, and during most of the cen-tury it was thought to be the oldest extant Tamil literature. Becauseof this antiquity our text stood at the centre of debates about thehistory of Tamil and its status vis-a-vis Sanskrit: because its authorwas said to be a Paraiyar, an Untouchable, it was prominent alsoin debates about the category of ‘Dravidian’. Not everyone acceptedthe Paraiyar identity of the author, Tiruvalluvar (hereafter,Valluvar); the alternative identities proposed for him included Jaina,Buddhist, crypto-Christian, high-caste Hindu, Brahmin and half-Brahmin. Clearly for Tamils the Kural. was a contentious classic—ithas received more commentaries (ten) than any other Tamil text—but it also became important for European missionaries and Britishcivil servants as well, who were comforted by its non-idolatrous teach-ings and translated it many times. It was also one of the first booksprinted from the College of Fort St. George, and it was later pre-scribed for primary, secondary and higher education. A tall statueof the author of the Kural. stands in a row with other Tamil culturalheroes on the seafront in Madras. Perhaps just as significant as ademonstration of the text’s role in colonial discourse, anotherhandsome statue of the poet, a gift from the Tamil Nadu Govern-ment through the High Commission for India in London, was erectedin 1996 on the campus of an institution for the study of formercolonial languages and cultures, the School of Oriental and AfricanStudies.

The debate about the Kural. and its author during the nineteenthcentury might recommend it as a case-study of the colonial rein-scription of a traditional Indian literature. The reality, as I hope toshow, was more complicated: a colonial intervention in a long-standing debate about the status of Tamil in terms of Sanskrit andBrahminical learning, and about the social relations between Brah-mins and Untouchables. The debate was articulated through various

6 See especially, Dalmia 1997:432.




readings of the Kural. and the legend of its author, in which the Euro-pean interpretations converged with and also modified Tamil notionsof their literary history. The two primary areas of convergence were:1) the lowly birth of Kural.’s author, which was controversial withinTamil tradition and valorized by the Europeans; and 2) the relationsbetween Tamil and Sanskrit which were set in a new historical andethical framework, in which corruption gives way to redemption. Outof this colonial discourse between Europeans and Tamils emerged aconsensus, a mutually convenient congruence between Tamil con-cerns about cultural difference and European notions of moral his-tory that produced a narrative of Tamil literary history which con-tinues to exert its influence today.

The Kural. and Valluvar

The Kural. is a collection of couplets, or aphorisms, on the morallife. It is so named because it was composed in the kural.-ven. pa (or‘short-verse’), one of five such metres used especially for aphoristicpoetry. The text is divided into three parts: aram (dharma), porul.(artha) and inpam (akin to kama, but closer to the English ‘pleasure’).Moks.a (Tamil vıt.u) was left out because, the commentators explain, itcannot be properly discussed in texts, although ascetic renunciation(turavaram) is treated as a topic under the first section, aram. Each ofthe three parts is further subdivided into ‘chapters’, 130 chapters inall, each with ten couplets, making for a grand total of 1330 verses.

Most scholarship, critical as well as appreciative, rightly focuseson the ethical teachings of the Kural.. This secondary literature inTamil and English is vast, but for the present purposes it is sufficientto know that the Kural. has a decidedly this-wordly orientation, withas much to say about rain as about religion; in fact, the book hasvery little to say about gods, rituals or temples. Commentators fromEllis (Sethu Pillai 1955:11) to Caldwell (1875:131) to Zvelebil(1975:157) have pointed out that the epithets used for ‘god’ displaya distinct Jaina influence, as indeed does the entire work with itsemphasis on asceticism in the world. On the other hand, the candidsensuality of the last section of ‘pleasure’ (which nineteenth-centurymissionaries, like Drew and Pope, publicly avowed was not proper totranslate) shows other influences, including the Sangam love poems.A few couplets will illustrate the tone and range of the Kural.’steachings:




When it rains, the world goes on; it is right to call rain ‘heavenly food’.

It is the aim of holy scripture to reveal the greatness of those men whohave left all for the sake of virtue.

When lovers quarrel, the loser always wins, as is obvious when they reunite.

In brief, then, the Kural. is certainly not a Saivite or a Vaisnavitetext, composed as it was before the development of bhakti poetry inTamil; it is practical, pragmatic and while it does not satirize Brah-mins or ritualism, neither does it eulogize them. It fully justifies itsfrequent description as a ‘Book of Wisdom’ or ‘Book of Moral Con-duct’ (nal neri or nıti nul). Any analogy with the Pancatantra, however,is seriously misleading since the Tamil book has none of the earlierbook’s satire.

The text itself is silent about its title, author and history. On thelast point, current scholarly consensus is that the Kural. was composedapproximately A.D. 500, that is a few hundred years after the Sangampoems of love and war and at least a century before the outpouringof religious poetry in Tamil. In part this dating is based on the infer-ence that its non-sectarian teachings reflect this period between theSangam and bhakti eras, when Jaina and Buddhist influences werestrong in the Tamil country. It is important to note, however, thatduring most of the nineteenth century the Kural. was considered tobe the earliest extant Tamil text and was dated variously from A.D.

400 to A.D. 1000.7

The name of the Kural.’s author, his social identity, as well as hintsabout the circumstances of the text’s composition first appeared sev-eral centuries later, in the Tiruval.l.uvamalai (10th c.?), a ‘Garland’ ofpraise poems to the author and his work. In the very first verse ofthe ‘Garland’, we learn that a ‘Tiru-valluvar’ (tiru, ‘divine’, ‘sacred’)composed the work, which the ‘Garland’ later calls the Tirukkural..But the title and the name lose some of their solidity when we realizethat eight other names are used for the author, and eight more forthe work itself. To add to the mounting confusion, ‘Tiruvalluvar’,the name given by the ‘Garland’ (and accepted ever since) as theauthor of the Kural., is itself subjected to competing interpretations,a process which occupied much of the debate in the nineteenth

7 The Kural. was dated variously by the major European writers: A.D. 400 by Kind-ersley; 6th–9th c. by Wilson; 9th c. by Murdoch (1865: xcix); A.D. 800–1000 by Pope.Tamil tradition considered it part of the Third Sangam, that is after Tolkappiyam andbefore the bhakti poets who first appeared in the 6th century A.D.




century. The primary meaning of val.l.uvar is a title for a ritualspecialist (and a sub-caste) among the Paraiyar, a numerousuntouchable caste in the Tamil country. A Valluvar, a title and officethat still exists, may be an exorcist, astrologer, fortune-teller, funeraldrummer and so forth.8

Perhaps the only thing about the Kural. which has not been dis-puted is its status as a classic in Tamil literature. No text hasreceived more scholarly commentaries (some lost) or subcommentar-ies. It is also the best-known and most frequently quoted of Tamiltexts, which did not escape the notice of Portuguese in the late six-teenth century.9 A German missionary, Bartholomaus Ziegenbalg,writing in 1708, gets it just about right:

The Malabaris think very highly of it and it is indeed one of the mostlearned and edifying books found amongst them. High-class Malabaris oftenmake it their handbook and whenever one enters into a discussion withthem they are always ready to quote a few verses from it to prove thevalidity of their words. It is the habit of educated Malabaris to confirm anddemonstrate everything with one or the other verse; to be able to do so isconsidered a great art amongst them. Therefore such books are not justread but learned by heart. [Gaur 1967: 69]

As for its poetic excellence, Valluvar’s mastery of the short-verseform is beyond dispute. The often-quoted verse in the ‘Garland’ byAuvaiyar, his legendary sister, puts it this way: ‘The kural. is like apierced mustard seed that contains the waters of the seven seas’.One is hard put to outdo the hyperbolic honours heaped upon thetext by Europeans: Ziegenbalg likened it to Seneca; Gover said itwas the Tamil Homer, The Ten Commandments and Dante rolledinto one. A verse from the ‘Garland’ had this to say:

It is difficult, even after careful consideration of each, to say whether theAryan language or Tamil is best: Sanskrit has the Veda but Tamil has the‘Tirukkural.’ by Valluvar.

8 According to one influential ethnography of Untouchabes in Tamilnadu, ‘Vallu-van Pantaram’ is a sub-caste of ritual specialists who perform marriage and otherlife-cycle rites for other (though not for the lowest) Untouchables and for somecastes immediately above them in the social order; the Valluvan Pantaram caste isitself subdivided into three or four groups (Moffatt 1979: 102–9). Deliege’s studyof another Untouchable community (including Christians) in another district ofTamilnadu, which challenged Moffatt’s central thesis, contain no mention of theValluvan subgroup (Deliege 1997). See also Thurston 1975 [1906].

9 On this Portuguese chronicle, which mentions Valluvar’s praise of ‘humility,abstinence, and of the disdain for idols’, see Subrahmanyam 1995:357.




Perhaps Robert Caldwell was thinking of this verse when hereportedly commented that the Vedas had never been translated intoTamil because it already had the Kural.

10

Sources for the Valluvar Legend

The undated Tiruval.l.uvamalai, as mentioned above, contains theearliest textual reference to the ‘Legend of Valluvar’.11 Although thistext is crucial to any reading of the legend, since its own compositionis narrated within that legend, it has received virtually no criticalattention. The ‘Garland’ consists of fifty-three short verses attributedto as many poets, mostly those of the Sangam period, but also adisembodied voice (acarıri), the goddess of speech (namakal.) and Sivain the form of the poet Iraiyanar. The very first verse of the ‘Garland’tersely describes the critical moment when Valluvar’s work wasunder examination by the poets of the legendary Sangam at Madu-rai; after they had accepted it, their decision was confirmed by aheavenly source:

In agreement, from the sky a voice was heard:‘With god-like Tiruval.l.uvar,Rudrajanman may sit on the good Sangam plank’.12

The commentary to this verse, written at the beginning of the nine-teenth century, then goes on to explain that the author of the Kural.was named ‘Valluvar’ because he was generous (van. mai) in ‘presentingthe esoteric wisdom of the Vedas to the world’. In the commentary onanother ‘Garland’ verse, something more is suggested about the iden-tity of Valluvar. That verse (attributed to Mamulanar) reads:

Even if the god who explained dharma, artha, kama and moksa in the Vedasis forgotten, there is a simple man named Valluvan, but the learned willnot hear what he has to say.13

10 Caldwell would have been pleased to know that the Kural. was (partially) trans-lated into Sanskrit in 1910.

11 Valluvar’s birth as a Paraiyar is briefly referred to in the more famous KapilarAkaval (10th c. ?), attributed to Kapilar, the legendary brother of Valluvar.

12 References to the Tiruval.l.uvamalai are from the text edited by ArumukamNavalar (11th edition, Madras, 1924/25). The Rudrajanman [uruttiracanmar] of thisverse is identified in the commentary as the reincarnation of god Murukan, whoappears in Tamil tradition as a literary judge in the Iraiyanar Akapporul. and later inthe Tiruvil.aiyat.al Puran. am. I am indebted to Prof. F. Gros and to Pandit T.V. GopalIyer for this information and for their invaluable help in translating this verse.

13 Cf. the translation of this same verse by Taylor, as quoted in Bower 1855, p.185: ‘This, as we thought stupid Pariah, is in reality no other than a god’.




In this verse, the Tamil word for ‘simple’ (petai, ‘naıve’, ‘young’,etc.) would seem to reveal little sociological information, and thegloss (pat.a urai) renders it as ‘without learning’; the explanatorycommentary (vil.akka urai), however, adds that it means that Vallu-var was ‘born in a low caste’.14 Here the commentator appears todraw on extra-textual information, probably the oral tradition inwhich the legend of Valluvar has been transmitted and continuesto be told today.

Aside from these two verses and their commentaries, nothingmore of Valluvar and his legend is disclosed in the ‘Garland’, whoseremaining verses vie with each other in constructing yet anotheranalogy with which to praise the Kural. and its author. The ‘Garland’verses are nevertheless part of the popular tradition of Valluvar inso-far as they indicate how the Kural. was imagined, especially in rela-tion to Sanskrit and Brahminical learning. Many verses, as is clearin the few examples provided above, select the Vedas as the objectof comparison, suggesting either parity with the ‘northern text’ (theusual Tamil expression) or superiority to it, as in this verse attrib-uted to Kotamanar:

Brahmins recited the four Vedas, fearing it would lose power if writtendown, but Valluvan’s Kural. can be recited by the learned and the commonalike and never lose power even though it has been written down.

The criteria for the Tamil text’s superiority are revealing: the Kural.need not be protected by an esoteric oral tradition; writing it down,for wider social circulation, does not diminish its value. The ‘Gar-land’s implicit critique of Brahminical tradition is later picked up inthe commentary to this verse which explains that although ‘Brah-mins maintained control over the Vedas, no one controls the Kural.’.

I have found no other pre-colonial textual sources for the Valluvarlegend, although we can be sure that the story was told and transmit-ted in oral tradition, as it is even today.15 With the consolidation ofBritish rule in south India at the end of the eighteenth century andthe establishment of the College of Fort St. George at Madras in1812, however, the debate about Valluvar and his Kural. ceased to

14 cati il.ivu tonra val.l.uvan. The commentary to the ‘Garland’ was written by Cara-vanaperumal Aiyar (b. 1799) (his debt to earlier commentaries is unknown). Onhis role in popularizing a Brahminical paternity for Valluvar, see Pantitar (1950);Geetha and Rajadurai (1993).

15 The Mackenzie collection includes at least one oral account of Valluvar’s tri-umph at Madurai, taken from a Meenachee Naig in 1809 (Mackenzie Collection,general, no. 1 ‘Sangattar cheritra’). On this text, see below.




be exclusively Tamil. In fact, the story of Valluvar appeared inEnglish almost as soon as the Company began to collect taxes andadminister a government for the British crown in South India.

In 1794, in the very first book in English on Tamil literature,Specimens of Hindoo Literature, the British civil servant N. A.Kindersley provided a brief summary of the Valluvar legend (alongwith a translation of some couplets from the Kural.).16 A few yearslater, a Dr John printed a Christianized version of Valluvar’s birth,though he claimed it was based on ‘ancient Tamil writings’(1801:362). F. W. Ellis, Collector of Madras and brilliant linguist-scholar, produced a partial translation of the Kural. with extensivenotes, probably in 1819, but curiously makes no mention of Vallu-var’s birth or legend.17 An 1822 English translation of Beschi’s 1730grammar of high Tamil does mention Valluvar’s low birth and hisposition as a ‘soothsayer’ of the Paraiyars. H. H. Wilson’s 1828descriptive catalogue of the Mackenzie manuscripts, which quotedextensively from Ellis, included a summary of the main events of theValluvar legend.18 Another brief summary of Valluvar’s life, writtenby a Telugu Brahmin who assisted in collecting the Mackenzie manu-scripts, was published in 1829.19

These brief notices were superseded in 1835, when Rev. WilliamTaylor, who took over the task of editing the Mackenzie material fromWilson, produced a full summary of the legend. Like Wilson, Taylorconcentrated on the events at Madurai inasmuch as they were usefulin reconstructing the ancient history of the Tamil country; he appearsto have digested previously printed accounts (especially Venkataram-asvamie 1829), as well as the Mackenzie manuscript upon whichWilson had relied.20 Although he passes quickly over Valluvar’s contro-versial birth, to his credit Taylor does include three slightly differingaccounts of Valluvar’s triumph over the proud poets of the MaduraiSangam.21 Another attempt to separate historical fact from unreliable

16 On this text, see Nambi Arooran 1981.17 Ellis’ translation has been published as Sethu Pillai 1955.18 A summary of Wilson’s 1828 account is given in Taylor 1835; Wilson also

published a full version of the second half of the legend, the Madurai episode(Wilson 1836), which is quoted in Bower 1855.

19 Venkataramaswamie 1829.20 Wilson 1882 [1828], p. 212; the Mackenzie manuscript is entitled ‘Sanghattar

Cheritra’.21 C. A. Drew published another partial translation of the Kural. in 1840 which

was influential because it was the first to include a Tamil commentary (by Parimela-lakar, 14th c.), although it makes no mention of the Valluvar legend.




legend was the account of Valluvar’s life published in Jaffna in 1859by Simon Casie Chitty. Drawing on many of his predecessors, but wish-ing to appear scrupulously factual, Chitty presents a bald summary ofthe birth and Madurai episodes only, adding that ‘nothing further isknown of Valluvar which can be relied upon’.22

By mid-century, however, after the emergence of a native pressand the beginnings of a public debate about the Tamil past, theValluvar story required more than these spare summaries. Alreadyin 1831, the Kural. and the ‘Garland’ had appeared in print; in 1840they were printed with a full commentary and a one-page summaryof the ‘History of Tiruvalluvar’, and in 1847 this summary of theValluvar legend had been expanded into an elaborate narration,covering seven pages of closely printed text.23 But Valluvar’santiquity and literary excellence were not the only reasons whyTamils began to print and debate his text. Its secular content wasalso useful to Tamils as they attempted to respond to Christianallegations of Hindu superstition and barbarity. As early as 1835, amissionary noted that the ‘Kural.’ is the only one [text] which theHindus have as yet . . . thought proper to print and publish, as speci-mens of their credence’ and as their ‘appeals of a purer system’.24

Concurrent with these Tamil publications, the brief sketches ofthe Valluvar legend in English gave way to more detailed narration,discussion and interpretation.25 By 1870, after nearly a century inMadras, British scholars, civil servants and missionaries had fash-ioned their own image of south Indian society and religion, in whichthe story of the lowly-born Valluvar was central. Missionary CharlesGover’s 1871 narration of the legend and his analysis of it is themost revealing. Unlike his European predecessors, who used thelegend for understanding past history, Gover presented the Valluvarlegend as evidence of a moral trajectory in Tamil literary historywhich informed the present; later tellings, notably by Robinson(1873, 1885) and Pope (1886), simply followed suit.26

22 Chitty 1859:102.23 These early printed editions of the Kural. and the ‘Garland’ are found in the

Oriental and India Office Collection at the British Library. See also Pantitar 1950.24 Taylor 1835:178.25 For these discussions of the Valluvar legend, see Bower 1855; Simon Casie

Chitty 1859; Murdoch 1865; Gover 1871; Robinson 1873; Baierlein 1875;Robinson 1885; Lazarus 1885; Pope 1886.

26 A French scholarly discourse on Valluvar also arose in the nineteenth-century:E. S. Ariel published an article on the legend of Tiruvalluvar in 1847, while J.Vinson produced a full translation of the Tiruval.l.uvar carittiram in 1864.




The Legend

Below is a composite version of the legend, drawn from both Tamiland English sources:

A Brahmin, named Bhagavan, travelled on pilgrimage when hestopped in a choultry to rest and met a Paraiyar woman, named Adi.Because she, a low-caste woman, approached him, he beat her witha metal ladle and cut her head. Having driven her away, Bhagavancontinued on to Benares, where he performed certain rituals andthen he returned home on the same route. Adi had grown into abeautiful woman and seeing her but not recognizing her, the Brah-min fell madly in love with her. Their marriage was soon arranged,but as the bridegroom poured fragrant oil on his bride’s head henoticed the healed wound and asked if she were the woman he hadattacked. When she said yes, he fled, and she followed.

Eventually finding him, she asked that he accept her as his wifeand he agreed on one condition: that they abandon whatever childrenshe might bear. She accepted this, and during their travelling, sevenchildren were born: four girls and three boys.

The first girl was Auvaiyar, the legendary author of ethical writ-ings [and nearly as famous as Valluvar]; the second girl became theTamil goddess Mariyamma; the third became the goddess Bhadra-kali and the fourth the Tamil goddess Valliyamma [later wed toMurukan]. The first-born son became a poet patronized by a Cheraking; the second was Kapilar [another popular poet and author ofthe Kapilar Akaval]27; the third and final son, the youngest of sevenchildren, was Valluvar.

Subject, like his siblings, to the strange marital pact between Brah-min father and Paraiyar mother, Valluvar was abandoned and laterraised by a Vellala woman [high non-Brahmin, landowning caste].Knowing the child was an Untouchable, she named him ‘Tiru-Valluvar’, or the ‘Divine Valluvar’. Once again, however, because herneighbours objected to the low-born child, he was abandoned and thistime picked up by a local family of Paraiyars. At five, he went back to hisadoptive Vellala parents and explained that he would leave the villageforever because he wished to cause them no further harm.

27 Kapilar has his own substory in the Valluvar legend; raised by Brahmins, hewas denied the sacred thread investiture and thus in anger wrote his Kapilar Akaval,which attacked Brahminical privilege and castism.




Setting forth in the world, he went to Pothikay Mountain and tookinstruction from Agastya and other sages.28 Later certain miraclesattended him. The shade of a tree under which he sat did not movethroughout the day, and he killed a demon that was ravaging thecountryside. A landowner, whose fields were saved, then offered hisdaughter, Vasuki, to Valluvar in marriage. He asked that she provehere virtue by turning sand into cooked rice, which she duly did.29

The couple went to Mylapore, a Brahmin quarter around a famoustemple in Madras, where Valluvar practiced the craft of weaving. Healso taught as a sage and performed miracles. Once he caused aflood and then walked calmly on as the waters receded; on anotheroccasion, he told his disciple, a ship merchant, to jump from the topof a tall tree, and the man was not injured. Later he touched theman’s grounded ship and it sailed off; later he advised him to sellhis paddy during the seven years of famine and yet his stores didnot diminish. This ship merchant, his son and other disciples, thenpersuaded Valluvar to write a book of his teachings. When he hadcomposed the 1330 couplets of the Kural., they advised him to takeit to Madurai and place it before the pandits of the Sangam therefor evaluation and acceptance.

On the way from Madras to Madurai, Valluvar met his sisterAuvaiyar and another poet, who encouraged him to use his poem tohumble the poets of Sangam. When he reached Madurai and recitedhis Kural. before them, they were ‘alarmed at his ability’, and sincehe was a Paraiyar they refused to accept the book. They put himthrough an oral examination which he passed with high marks. Then,as a last resort, the poets said, ‘O Pariah, a doubt has arisen in ourminds concerning the worth of your book, solve this and we willaccept it. It is this—the bench we sit on has remarkable power: itwill only allow upon it books written in pure high Tamil. So placeyour book on it. If the bench receives it, we will also’.30 When Vallu-var placed his poem on the plank, it miraculously began to contract,throwing off the pandits, until only the Kural. remained on it. [this isdescribed in the first verse of the ‘Garland’.] Shocked and defeated,

28 In some versions this episode occurs earlier, when Valluvar leaves his adoptivefamily.

29 Some of these incidents, the unmoving shade of a tree and the cooking test forchaste women, are common in Indian tradition narratives.

30 Gover 1871:213. The ‘bench’ was a plank that floats in the temple tank atMadurai; in most versions, it held not only texts but was just wide enough to com-fortably seat the 49 poets of the Sangam.




the 49 Sangam poets could no longer refuse to accept the Kural., andindeed they each composed an impromptu verse praising Valluvarand his work [= the ‘Garland’].

Returning home to Mylapore, Valluvar resumed his weaving andteaching. As old age approached, he told his friends that when hedied he wanted no special ceremony; he asked them only to drag hisbody around the village and then deposit it under a bush somewhere.But when Valluvar died, his disciples prepared a golden coffin andplaced him in it; miraculously opening his eyes as he lay in the box,Valluvar scolded them and told them to carry out his original wishes.They did and left him, abandoned once again, under a bush.

So he was cast out, and the merchant ‘observed that the crows andother animals that devoured his holy flesh became as beautiful asgold; and therefore, greatly wondering, he [the merchant] built atemple, and instituted worship, on the spot where the sacred corpsehad lain’.31

The first thing we can say about this legend is that it is composed ofelements common to international and Indian folklore. The hero asthe youngest of seven children, his being cast out (as an outcaste)and his destroying a monster to win the daughter are all popularthemes in international folktales, while the miracle of the unmovingtree shade is found in the legend of Buddha. Still the story is unmis-takably south Indian. Individual motifs, such as Valluvar’s test of hisfuture bride’s virtue by asking her to cook rice from sand (or stones),are commonplace in Tamil tales. More significantly, the two majorepisodes of the legend—the mixed-caste parentage of Valluvar andhis submitting his poem for examination by other poets—are alsowidespread in south Indian oral narrative and literary legend. Brah-min fathers and Untouchable mothers regularly produce southIndian cultural heroes, such as Muttuppattan, popular regional god-desses, such as Renuka, and a host of lesser-known figures.32 Thesecond major episode, the proving of the Kural. in its arankerram, is anecessary procedure in order to legitimize any highly-regarded Tamilcomposition, as Kampan and others can attest.33

31 Robinson 1885: 71.32 Blackburn 1988; Ramanujan 1980. For a Malayali version of the Valluvar

legend, see Subramania Iyer 1979. I wish to thank Giles Tarabout for bringing thisarticle to my attention.

33 Shulman 1993; Blackburn 1996.




These two episodes, Valluvar’s birth and the testing of his poem,are the core of the legend and the source of its contested readings.This is hardly surprising, since these episodes claim, first, that theoldest extant Tamil text (at the time) was written by a Paraiyar and,second, that this Kural. triumphed over a degenerate, SanskritizedTamil at the ancient Madurai Sangam.

Readings: Valluvar’s Birth

The first of the two core episodes, the parentage of Valluvar, hasbeen the more contentious and generated more competing versions.Literary legends, especially of famous poets, are often more influen-tial and widely-known that are the texts attributed to those poets.When the author in question is said to have composed the culture’soldest extant text, the story of his birth is nothing less than an originmyth of a literature. And when the poet is said to be a Paraiyar, theorigin myth is shot through with controversy. Indeed, one measureof cultural significance of Valluvar’s birth is that it often stands, parspro toto, for the entire legend. Many references to Valluvar mentionnothing more than his birth, in its various formulations. As onewriter concisely put it in 1873, ‘That he was a Pariah, no onedoubts’.34 In fact, however, there were doubts.

Some writers in the nineteenth-century chose to sidestep the ques-tion of Valluvar’s birth altogether and declare, on the strength ofthe text’s teachings, that he must have been a Jain.35 This claim,part of the pre-colonial Tamil debate about the Kural., was broughtout by Ellis in his notes to his 1819[?] translation of the Kural., andhas remained the preferred scholarly option to this day.36 But themainstream colonial debate centred on four versions of Valluvar’sbirth: 1) that he was half-Brahmin (father) and half-Paraiyar(mother); 2) that he was neither Brahmin nor Paraiyar, but a royalofficial; 3) that he was a Paraiyar; and 4) that he was fully Brahmin.37

34 Robinson 1873:14.35 Compare a similar tactic in south Indian Jain Ramayanas which sidestep con-

troversy in the Rama story by making the god-hero a realized soul who did not,indeed could not, kill Ravana or Vali.

36 Zvelebil (1974: 119, fn 10). See also Culter (1992) on the Brahminical slantin Parimelalakar’s medieval commentary (13th/14th c.).

37 According to Daniel (1997: 55, 73), Paraiyars among tea estate Tamils in SriLanka are in no doubt that Valluvar is their direct ancestor.




Valluvar’s mixed-caste parentage (the first version) is certainly themost common form of the legend, and is a widespread motif in southIndian traditional narrative.38 As is often pointed out by comment-ators, the names for his parents, ‘Adi’ (Paraiyar mother} and ‘Bhaga-van’ (Brahmin father), occur in the very first verse of the Kural., whichmay have given rise to the story of his mixed-birth.39 The Brahmin–Untouchable birth may also be read psychoanalytically as a catharticexpression of a cultural phobia about pollution and commingling ofbodily fluids, or less viscerally as a symbol of the two classical literarytraditions in south India, a kind of social hybrid emblematic of theliterary man. i-pravalam. It should also be pointed out that the office of‘Valluvan’ itself straddles social categories. As the ‘priest’ or ritualspecialist of the Paraiyar and other Untouchables, the Valluvan isnot wholly Paraiyar: he lives outside the ceri (Untouchable hamlet),if not quite in the ur with higher castes, and sometimes he wears asacred thread. The tiru (= ‘sacred’, ‘divine’) prefixed to Tiru-Valluvar’s name only emphasizes his special status as both a Paraiyarand not a Paraiyar.40 This sociological hybridity is undoubtedly onesource of the mixed parentage in the Valluvar legend.

Although the mixed parentage was the most common printed ver-sion of the legend, some Tamils explicity challenged the truth of thisclaim. A robust rebuttal is found in the first history of Tamil literat-ure, published in 1904 by the ardent Dravidianist PurnalingamPillai. Pillai claimed that the whole birth story was an ‘ugly legend’and mere ‘myth’ and argued that ‘valluvan’ was not a caste name inthe poet’s time.41 ‘Nor was he a priest of a lowly caste’, Pillai wrotein defiance of received truths; instead he was a poet and diplomatwhose combined skills earned him the office of a ‘proclaimer,mounted on an elephant, of royal commands and edicts, feasts andfestivals, by drum-beats’.42 The term ‘valluvar’, he continued, denotesthis royal office.43 Pillai rounded out his radical re-reading of the

38 Chitty claims that the mixed Brahmin–Paraiyar parentage is the common ele-ment in ‘all accounts’ (Chitty 1859:101).

39 The Tamil phrase ati bhagavan actually refers to the ‘primordial lord’, ‘universalgod’ (or some such English phrase).

40 One European described the hybridity of a Valluvan this way: ‘even to a prac-tised eye is it difficult to spot the Paraiyar in him’ (Lazarus 1908:22).

41 Pillai 1904: 86–7.42 Ibid., 87.43 The Tamil Lexicon accepts this function, of royal herald, as one meaning of

valluvan. Thurston, citing Tivakaram and Cut.aman. i Nikan. t.u, writes that ‘the Valluvanswere priests to the Pallava kings before the introduction of Brahmans’ (1906:303).




legend by denying that Valluvar was ever a weaver (a low-status craftand caste) or that his poem contains any mention of weaving. ForPillai, then, Valluvar was a Hindu, not a Jain. Pillai’s rationalism andhis critique of Brahminical dominance meant he would not accept aBrahmin birth for this famous Tamil poet, but neither was he ableto accept that Valluvar was a Paraiyar.

Not all nineteenth-century readings, however, denied his lowlybirth, and some argued that the mixed-caste birth was a deliberatefabrication to obscure the unpalatable truth that a Paraiyar had writ-ten the Kural.. On this essential point European writers were nearlyunanimous and forged an alliance with some Tamil writers that hashad an enduring influence on the writing of Tamil literary history.The most succinct statement of this third position of Valluvar’s birthcomes from Charles Gover’s 1871 telling of the legend, whichincludes the mixed-parentage; after telling the story, Gover addedthis observation:

It is clear as light that all this is but an example of the literary fraud thathas so often been referred to. With Kapila[r], things were carried further;and his poems were claimed as translations from Sanskrit originals.44

Two pages later, Gover continued his attack on the Brahminicalmanipulations of Tamil literary tradition:

Strip the story of its Brahmanical element and we learn that Tiruvalluvarwas a member of a low Dravidian caste, that he owned nothing and gavenothing to the sacredotal caste (after the disappearance of Bhagavan thereis not one reference to a Brahman in all the story).45

A Tamil intellectual, and contemporary of Gover, who followed asimilar line of attack was Ayotidas Pandithar [Pantitar].46 Born anUntouchable (panchama) in Coimbatore district in the mid-nineteenth-century, Pandithar founded a Dravida Mahajana Sangain 1881 and later, after his meetings with Colonel Olcott and AnnieBesant, established a Chakya Buddhist Sangam in Madras. In Pandi-thar’s version of history, the original Tamils were all Paraiyars, andBuddhists, descended form the Sakya clan of Gautama; later Brah-mins made them into ‘Hindus’ and relegated them to the bottom ofthe social hierarchy. He developed this theory further in his pamph-let ‘The History of Tiruvalluvar’, in which he argued that the

44 Gover 1871:215.45 Ibid., 217.46 My discussion of Pandithar borrows heavily from Geetha and Rajadurai 1993.

See also Geetha and Rajadurai 1998; Aloysius 1998.




Tirukkural.’s original title was ‘Tiri-Kural.’, modeling its three sectionson the tripartite division of Theravada Buddhist scriptures. He wenton to say that the legend of Valluvar’s mixed-caste parentage wasan attempt by Brahmins to deny that a low-caste man could havewritten this most revered of Tamil texts. Brahmins, according toPandithar, could not completely remove the Paraiyar element fromthe story but they could neutralize it by the invention of a Brahminfatherhood. As evidence of this Brahminical manipulation, Panditharcompared early editions of the Kural. and found that whereas thosepublished in 1831 and 1834 contained nothing about Valluvar’sbirth, those published shortly thereafter by a pair of Brahmin broth-ers did. An edition of 1835, published by Caravanaperumal Aiyar,included a mention of Valluvar’s birth from a Brahmin father andParaiyar mother, and his marriage to a merchant’s daughter.Emboldened that he could defend the inclusion of this made-upstory, in his 1837 edition Visakaperumal Aiyar placed the story ofValluvar’s birth in an Introduction. The birth story is obviously fic-tion, continues Pandithar, since in one edition Valluvar has sevensiblings and in the other only six; in one book he marries a mer-chant’s daughter and in the other a Vellala woman. The Sanskritiz-ation traced by Pandithar was completed with an 1847 edition inwhich Valluvar’s birth is set within a mythic framework and hisgenealogy traced back to ancient sages.47

Although some of Pandithar’s history is misinformed,48 andalthough I have not been able to consult all the early editions of theKural. cited by Pandithar, his indictment of Brahminical manipulationsof the Valluvar legend are echoed by some of his European contempor-aries.49 Gover, for whom the Valluvar legend provided everything heneeded to know about Tamil religion and social history, appears tohave taken his elaborate telling of the legend from the 1847 editioncited by Pandithar. In both these versions, Valluvar is fully Brahminby birth: Brahma wants to perfect both the ‘northern tongue’ and the‘southern tongue’ and after engineering a few couplings and births,

47 Pantitar 1950. I want to thank V. Geetha for kindly making available to me acopy of Pantitar’s pamphlet.

48 Ellis, for example, could not have established a ‘Tamil Sangam’ in 1825, asPanditar claims, since he had died in 1819.

49 In the British Library (Oriental and India Office Collection), I was able toconsult the 1837, 1840 and 1873 editions of the Kural. and the ‘Garland’, whichlargely confirm Panditar’s arguments about incremental additions to the Valluvarlegend.




Vyasa is born to accomplish this task for Sanskrit. In the south,Brahma performs a Vedic sacrifice, from which emerges Sarasvati,whom Brahma marries, begetting Agastya, who becomes the grand-father of Bhagavan, and thus the great-grandfather of Valluvar. Then,as in other accounts, Bhagavan meets and later marries Adi: this time,however, she is said not to be an Untouchable, but a Brahmin girl aban-doned by her parents and raised by Paraiyars.50

In these Sanskritized tellings, then, Valluvar was not half Brah-min: he was fully Brahmin, which is a fourth version of his contestedbirth. It is a minority opinion, but it has had its admirers, amongthem the respected scholar Ramachandra Dikshitar, who argued in1936 that Valluvar was completely Brahmins.51 By inserting a priorBrahmin birth to cancel the appearance of low-caste origin, thisfourth version of the birth borrows from south Indian folk narrativetradition. Indeed Valluvar’s legendary birth bears a striking similar-ity to some versions of the Muttuppattan story, a bow song from thesouthern Tamil country which contains the same inserted birthmotif. The core story is that the Brahmin Muttuppattan falls in lovewith and marries two Untouchable (cakkiliyar) women; some printedand oral performances, however, begin the story in Siva’s heavenwhere two women disturb a sage in meditation and are cursed to beborn on earth and to marry an Untouchable. Born in a Brahminfamily, they are quickly abandoned (to avoid gossip since they areborn when their father is away on pilgrimage), later raised by Parai-yars and finally married by Muttuppattan. Just as these brides of acultural hero worshipped in the south Tamil country were convertedto Brahmins, Valluvar’s untouchable mother ( and thereby Valluvarhimself) became a Brahmin through the narrative technique ofinserting a prior birth on a mythic plane.52

Despite obvious differences among the various social identitiesclaimed for Valluvar by Tamils, one commonality is noteworthy: noone is quite willing to accept wholeheartedly a Paraiyar identity forthe author of the Kural.. He might be a Jain, or a Vellala, or a Brah-min, perhaps only partially a Brahmin, but he cannot be an Untouch-able. Even Pandithar, who argued that Valluvar’s Brahmin paternityis a lie, claimed that the poet was a Buddhist (and thereby not an

50 In this mythic account, Valluvar’s grandmother is Untouchable, as if the poet’slowly birth can be pushed further and further back in time but never completelyerased.

51 Diskshitar 1936.52 See Blackburn 1988.




Untouchable). The problem here is that Indian tradition does notlike its heroes to have a low birth; a Paraiyar poet could be, at best,only an ambivalent symbol of cultural pride for Tamils in the nine-teenth century. By contrast, Europeans prefer their religious heroesto come from humble origins. During the nineteenth-century Chris-tian missionaries and European scholars in south India agreed withthe anti-Brahmin stance taken by some Tamils and promoted Vallu-var as a Paraiyar literary hero. That lowly status, in fact, conformedto European expectations and stimulated their interest in this long-standing debate, which they soon reinterpreted through their ownmoral and historical perspectives.

One of the earliest retellings of Valluvar’s birth (within the storyof his sister Auvaiyar) begins with ‘a bright star falling down, in avillage inhabited by outcasts’.53 Most European versions are not sotransparently transpositions of the Christ story, but they all displaysigns of cultural translation. Almost without exception, the earlyEuropean notices of Valluvar are consistent in mentioning the lowstatus of the Tamil poet’s birth. Writing in 1730, in the Preface tohis grammar of High Tamil, the Italian missionary and scholar ofTamil, Constanzo Beschi, explained that Valluvar ‘was of the lowtribe of Paraya’, adding the ‘Valluvan’ is the name for ‘soothsayersand learned men of the Paraya tribe’.54 Later European students ofTamil, for whom Beschi’s grammars and dictionaries becamerequired reading, echoed the Italian’s phrase when describing Vallu-var. In his 1794 publication, Kindersley included a footnote toexplain that tradition considers Valluvar a ‘priest of the lowest orderof the Hindoos (the pariar)’.55 Wilson’s 1828 notice of Valluvar refersto his ‘inferior birth’, and Bower at mid-century called Valluvar a‘poor, despised Pariah’.56

When, and to what extent, these European readings began toinfluence Tamil ones is a difficult question to answer with any preci-sion. At the very least we can say that there was a convergencebetween a pre-colonial Tamil reading of Valluvar as a Paraiyar anda European desire to accept that version of events. At the beginningof the century, as we have seen, the Tamil commentator of the ‘Gar-land’ constructed the ‘simple’ (petai) nature of Valluvar to refer tohis ‘low-caste birth’. Toward the end of the century, the European

53 Dr John 1801:346.54 Beschi 1822 [manuscript of 1730]: 12, 13.55 Kindersley 1794:53.56 Wilson 1882 [1828] 230; Bower 1855: 184.




reading of Valluvar as a hero of low origins achieved literary formwhen George U. Pope began his translation of the Kural. with apraise-poem of his own:

Sage Valluvar, priest of thy lowly clanNo tongue repeats, no speech reveals thy name;Yet all things changing, dieth not thy fame

For thou art bard of universal man.

In Valluvar, the low-born sufferer who wins out against social eviland religious domination, the Europeans found a Tamil cultural herowhom they could embrace. In Pope’s words, ‘The last has indeedcome first’.57

Readings: The Madurai Episode

As Pope’s Biblical phrase implies, Valluvar’s low birth was only halfthe story; he must also, and against the odds, succeed. In southIndian narrative and cultural logic, too, his Paraiyar birth set up anecessary confrontation with high-caste domination. Although thissecond core episode is thus a continuation of the tension generatedwithin the first episode, the nature of its contestation is different.Valluvar’s triumph at Madurai, when the astounded poets wereforced to accept the Kural. and write praise-poems on it, has not beenaccused of selective Brahminical ‘editing’, as was the case with thebirth episode.58 Rather, the episode itself is a contestation, betweenclaimants to the crown of authentic Tamil literary tradition. Thevarious readings of this legendary struggle for control of the literarypast must themselves be read in the context of the cultural politicsof the nineteenth-century. In these accounts of the Madurai episode,European and (some) Tamil interpretations of the Valluvar legendonce again converge, this time in a fortuitous alliance between theforeigners’ perception of a corrupt but perfectable civilization andthe Tamils’ pursuit of a literary history that would rescue a purelanguage from its Sanskrit accretions.

A key element in this alliance is the slippage that occurs, in theaccounts of the Madurai episode, between the Sangam poets and

57 Pope 1886:ii.58 Kindersley (1794, 53), writes that Brahmins deny the story of Valluvar’s tri-

umph at Madurai. Taylor (1862, p. 20) mentions three versions of the episode,which differ chiefly in the details about the wondrous plank in the lotus-tank (didit expand, or contract? Were the poets thrown into the water or not?).




‘Brahmins’. Only a few of those ancient poets were in fact Brahmins,perhaps as few as ten percent; but once they had been collectivelyidentified as ‘Brahmins’, the entire legend fell into place (for differ-ent reasons) for European and Tamil commentators alike.59 In orderto understand how this conflation might occur, we should begin byobserving that the legend is fundamentally a tale of caste conflictand that is it especially anti-Brahmin. In the first major episode,following the puranic frame in some versions, Bhagavan rejects Adiand wounds her in the head, simply because she is a Paraiyar. TheBrahmin then forces her to accept as a condition for their marriagethat she must abandon her children at birth. In due course, Valluvaris abandoned, and then abandoned a second time because of high-caste (Vellala) prejudice against him as a Paraiyar. Later, Kapilar,one of Valluvar’s brothers, is raised by Brahmins but ultimatelyrejected by them, and as a consequence composes a caustic critiqueof caste and ritual in the form of a well-known poem (Kapilar Akaval).The inclusion of this substory of Kapilar into the Valluvar legendindelibly stamps the whole story with an anti-Brahmin character.Finally, when Valluvar finally reaches Madurai, he is encouraged tohumble the pride of the poets, who reject him and his poem becauseof his low-caste identity.

Given this repeated antagonism in the legend between Brahminsand Paraiyars, it is easy to understand how the Sangam poets, thefinal opponents of Valluvar, might be identified as ‘Brahmins’. Cer-tainly this slippage occurs early on in the European sources. Kind-ersley’s 1794 summary of the legend speaks of the Brahmins at Mad-urai, and an 1855 account observes that ‘[t]o humble the pride andarrogance of the brahmans, a poor despised Pariah is raised up byprovidence to be the first of Tamil philosophers and perhaps thechief of Hindu moralists’.60 Taylor’s 1835 account identifies the Mad-urai poets as ‘Brahmins’ and, going one step further, reports thatwhen the Kural. was accepted at Madurai, Valluvar himself was ‘madea Brahmin’.61 Even if this identification of the haughty poets as Brah-mins was not entirely consistent in European readings of the legend,the association of those poets with Sanskrit learning was. And thiswas the crucial point, since once the defeated poets of Madurai werelinked with Sanskrit (and thereby Brahminical tradition), the Vallu-

59 The usual Tamil term for these ‘poets’ is pulavar, a poet, scholar and punditrolled into one.

60 Kindersley 1794:53; Bower 1855:184.61 Taylor 1835: 177.




var legend could be read as an allegory of corruption andredemption.

The very first English account of the Kural. in print called attentionto these themes. In his introductory notes to the translated verses,Kindersley wrote that Tamil literature had ‘long been deeply on thedecline . . . and this has consequently produced a corruption’.62 Thespecific place of Valluvar’s text in Tamil literary history is mademore explicit in H. H. Wilson’s 1836 analysis of the legend. Aftera brief summary of the poet’s triumph in Madurai, Wilson explainsthat ‘in a literary view’ alone we can understand Valluvar’s overthrowof the Madurai poets as a revival of old, pure Tamil. The poets ofthe original Sangam, Wilson explained, were ‘eminent in Tamil com-position’ but later poets

directed their attention more to Sanskrit composition and . . . neglected thecultivation of their literature . . .With Tiruvalluvar, however, circumstanceschanged. The old system was subverted, and a new impulse was given tothe study of Tamil, which produced, in the course of the ninth century . . .a number of the most classical writers in the Tamil tongue.63

A similar redemptive reading is offered a few decades later by amissionary, who wrote: ‘Just when the Tamil language was in dangerof losing its purity, there came a Pariah Priest and a weaver fromMylapore’.64 Valluvar’s presentation of the Kural. to Madurai poets,he continued, ‘effected a kind of revolution in the language’ and‘gave a check to the prevalence of Sanskriticisms’.65 Again, Pope atthe end of the century, dismisses the whole legend as untrue butcannot refrain from stating that ‘[t]he truth seems to be the MaduraSchool of Tamil literature, now too full of Sanskrit influences, wassupreme till the advent of [Valluvar]’.66

Once it was understood that Valluvar had battled against thenorthern tradition of Sanskrit and Brahminical learning, the Euro-pean readings of the Madurai episode could enter into and influencethe long-running debate about the history of Tamil and its statusvis-a-vis Sanskrit. This is not the place to discuss the history of thatconflict, but one thing is clear: from a very early date, Tamil traditionregarded the Sanskrit tradition with envy and resentment, as well

62 Kindersley 1794:48.63 Wilson 1836, 217–18 (reproduced in part in Bower 1855).64 Baierlein 1875: 18.65 Ibid:20.66 Pope 1886:iv.




as with admiration and respect.67 Although pre-colonial interpreta-tions of the Valluvar legend appear limited to the few sources discus-sed above, the ‘Garland’ registers the Tamil–Sanskrit conflict by itsfrequently combative comparisons between the Kural. and the Vedas,between Tamil and ariyam (‘aryan’) and so on. Clearly the Europeanreadings of the legend did not create or even introduce these combat-ive elements to the debate. What they did bring to the debate, how-ever, was a new moral, teleological framework that explained thepast and set an agenda for the present and future.

The Orientalist translation of India into European categories andconcepts has been described and critiqued in several studies.68 In thecase of the European insistence on the ‘humble origins’ of Valluvar,we recognize a colonial interpretation of south Indian culture withinthe historical narrative of European Christianity. Informing thisinterpretation, however, is a more fundamental perception, a beliefthat ‘modern Hindu life in Southern India much resembles that ofEurope just before the Reformation’.69 With this statement, CharlesGover introduced his translations of ‘folk-songs’ of south India which,he believed, reveal a ‘silent Reformation’ which had been at work forcenturies, in local non-Brahmin sects, and which, while not breakingcompletely with the Brahminical order, ‘present a scheme, moremoral than religious, in which idolatry is unknown, and the divinityis always spoken of as the great soul of the universe, one and invis-ible’.70 Gover then presented translations of Valluvar’s Kural., alongwith other anti-caste, anti-ritual literature in Tamil, as a shiningexample of this popular Hinduism, this ‘secret’ reformation, under-mining the priestly domination of Brahmins. Valluvar’s teachingsthus represented a deism, over against a polytheism of theBrahmins.71

Other European readings of the Valluvar legend may lack Gover’smelodrama, but collectively they produce a Tamil literary history inwhich corruption is redeemed: an authentic Tamil had been cor-rupted by the Madurai poets until Valluvar’s triumph restored its

67 On the history of Tamil-Sanskrit relations, see Annamalai 1979; Shivathamby1986; Ramaswamy 1997.

68 Kopf 1969; Said 1978; Inden 1990; Viswanathan 1990.69 Gover 1871:6. The orientalists’ search for a Golden Age in India is described

in Kopf 1969 (and critiqued by Vishwanathan 1990).70 Gover 1871:6–8.71 Even this attempt to translate the Kural. into a Indian brand of Christianity,

however, did not go unchallenged among nineteenth-century missionaries. See, forexample, Taylor 1862: 21–2.




prior purity. Even more telling were the details of this literary historyas presented by Europeans: ancient Tamil civilization had been cor-rupted by a sacredotal order, an abrogation of power by a priestly,institutionalized and centralized elite. The European worldviewbehind this writing of literary history was nowhere more succinctlyrevealed than in Robert Caldwell’s comment that the whole of theTen Commandments could be translated into a pre-Sanskritic Tamil,except for one word: ‘image’.72 What was needed was to strip awaythese distorting accretions and revive the old moral code, the bed-rock that had been obscured by priestly pride, power and ritual. Whatwas needed, in a word, was a Reformation.

Colonial Discourse: Paraiyars and Dravidians

The allegory of corruption and redemption underlying the European(and Tamil) interpretation of the Valluvar legend had implicationsbeyond theology. In his recent book, Tom Trautmann suggests thatthe Aryan–Dravidian contrast ‘revealed’ by F. W. Ellis and his Tamilassistants in the early nineteenth-century was later resignified as aBrahmin/non-Brahmin opposition, and in that form contributed tothe non-Brahmin movement in the early twentieth-century.73 Thisargument has also been advanced by two recent essays which focuson the influential figure of Robert Caldwell and discuss the intellec-tual legacy bequeathed by his anti-Brahminism to the non-Brahminmovement.74 Caldwell (1814–1891) is famous as the author of thedefinitive and systematic proof that Tamil was not derived from San-skrit, A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South Indian Family ofLanguages (1856), which certainly had a significant impact on thedevelopment of Dravidian consciousness (although it is curious thathis book was not translated into Tamil until 1941).

The material presented in this essay suggests, however, that thisargument linking Caldwell to the later non-Brahmin movementrequires modifications.75 First, it is necessary to emphasize that theBrahmin/non-Brahmin conflict has had a very long history in Tamiltradition, as exemplified by the Valluvar legend, and was not the

72 Caldwell 1976 [1856]:49. Caldwell, presumably, was thinking of the Sanskrit-derived rupam.

73 Trautmann 1997:221–2.74 Ravindran 1996; Dirks 1995.75 Annamalai 1979:53.




consequence of a European revelation of a Aryan/Dravidian linguisticdivision. Similarly, the Aryan/Dravidian split itself had a pre-colonialhistory, as evidenced, for example, by the verses in the ‘Garland’.But most importantly, the readings of the Valluvar legend demon-strate that Caldwell’s writings must also be situated within its con-temporary context, the nineteenth-century discourse between Euro-peans and Tamils about literary history, and principally aboutValluvar.

For all his individualism, Caldwell fell into line with his contem-poraries in his comments about Valluvar and his poem: he arguedthat the Kural. was the oldest extant Tamil text (datable to about the10th century A.D.), and that it was a genuine Tamil classic becauseit stood independently of Sanskrit.76 Caldwell also believed that Val-luvar was a Paraiyar; in his history of the Tinnevelly District, hewrote, ‘Tiruvalluvar (a name which means the sacred Paraiya priest)is esteemed the prince of Tamil poets; but having been a Paraya, itwas not without miracle wrought in his favour that he was allowed aplace on the much-coveted bench’. 77 As was true of his contemporar-ies, Caldwell’s position on the Valluvar legend necessarily implied anopposition to Brahminism. At one point in his grammar, for example,Caldwell remarked that Brahmins have written almost nothing ofvalue in Tamil and that the highest achievement by a Brahmin inTamil literature was a famous commentary on the Kural. [promptingan editor to note in the 1976 edition that this is untrue].78 Caldwell’santi-Brahminism is evident also in his theory of ‘Dravidian’ folk reli-gion (extrapolated from his study of Nadars in Tinnevelly district) inwhich he claimed that northern traditions had obscured and defiled aprimordial Tamil culture.79

One of the contributions of Trautmann’s recent book is to makeclear what was known only in a small corner of Tamil studies:namely, Caldwell’s justly famous grammar is heavily indebted to theearlier work of F. W. Ellis.80 What is less well-known is that Caldwellfollowed Ellis in another respect: the propagation of the idea thatParaiyars were the Tamil sons of the soil. As Eugene Irschick showsin his book on the nineteenth-century, Ellis was instrumental inadvocating that Paraiyars be considered legitimate landowners, as

76 See Caldwell 1875:130–2, on Valluvar and his poem.77 Caldwell 1881:227. See also, Caldwell 1875:130–2.78 Caldwell 1875:50.79 Caldwell 1847.80 Trautmann 1997: 149–55.




part of the tax regime (mirasidar system) that he supported.81 Ageneration later, Caldwell lent further support to this identificationof Paraiyars as the original Tamils. In his essay, ‘Are the Pariars ofsouthern India Dravidians?’ (appended to the second edition of hisgrammar but omitted from later editions), he argues that they arethe Adi-Dravidians. He also states that the myth that Paraiyars area result of miscegenation with Brahmins is false, ‘invented and prop-agated’ by Brahmins in order to maintain their superiority.82 Thisdiscourse on Paraiyars, from Ellis on land rights at the beginning ofthe century to Caldwell (and others) on history and religion at theend of the century, is a direct consequence of their readings of theValluvar legend. Just as Valluvar came from humble origins and suf-fered because of it, Paraiyars as a group were seen as the originalTamils who were displaced by more powerful castes. And this ethi-cized literary history went beyond intellectual debate and penetratedpublic policy, as is evident in the following quotation from a docu-ment written by the Collector of Chingleput in 1892:

[T]he Pariahs were not always in their present condition of degradation.The most popular poem ever produced in Tamil country, the Kural, waswritten by a Pariah named Tiruvalluvar ‘the divine Pariah’ as he has beencalled. (Irschick 1994:182).

Conclusions: Corruption and Redemption inTamil Literary History

Among the various forces behind the colonial mission was the self-justifying perception that India was ritual-ridden and dominated bya priestly elite.83 This prejudice was not simply an inflection of south-ern linguistic politics, for no less an influential figure in the colonialdefinition of Hindustani than John Gilchrist thought that Sanskritwas ‘a cunning fabrication . . . by the insidious Bruhmuns’.84 Theintellectual origins of this anti-Brahmin bias among so many earlyEuropeans in India are beyond the scope of this essay. What we cansay at this point is that in south India those attitudes found a naturalhome in the local and long-standing conflict with Sanskrit and Brah-minical learning. The moral and historical models which the Euro-

81 Irschick 1994: 182–5.82 Caldwell 1856: 492–3.83 Kopf 1969:156, passim.84 Lelyveld 1993:671.




peans brought with them, the narratives of corruption and redemp-tion that underlay the Reformation model, dovetailed with Tamilreadings of their own cultural and literary history. This was a power-ful alliance, driven on the one hand by a European belief in the moralimperative to reform and improve, and on the other by a Tamil per-ception of loss and a desire to regain a purer past.

This congruence between European and Tamil readings of the Val-luvar legend and his Kural. rests on three interpretive moves. First,the humble birth of the Paraiyar poet fit into a European traditionof the low-born, suffering hero. Second, his triumph at Madurai wasinterpreted as a victory against a priestly elite, as a reformation ofPapist ritualism, while his Kural. was valorized as a deism superior topolytheism. Third, Valluvar and Paraiyars generally were seen asprimordial sons of the Tamil soil, the Adi-Dravidians displaced bycrafty Brahmins. As a result of these convergences, the dominantreading of the Valluvar legend to emerge from the nineteenth-century was a story of corruption and redemption. Pure Tamil hadbeen corrupted by Sanskrit/Brahmins but then redeemed by Valluvarand his Kural., which ushered in the highpoint of Tamil classical liter-ature. Loss and deliverance is of course a theme that threads throughTamil literary tradition: loss of the first and second Sangams (byflood), loss of Vedas, loss of Lemuria. When this theme was alloyedwith biblical morality, however, it was ethicized as a narrative ofcorruption and redemption.

Themes of corruption and redemption, I would argue, have influ-enced the writing of Tamil literary history from the nineteenth-century down to the present. Valluvar’s overthrow of the proud poetsin ancient Madurai became a paradigmatic event, to be reimaginedand re-enacted again in the nineteenth-century by reformist Euro-peans and Tamils. Valluvar had redeemed ancient Tamil from cor-ruption, but the language had been debased once again in the medi-eval period and required a second coming to rid it of Sanskrit andBrahminical accretions, such as ritual idolatry, priestly pedantry andliterary artifice.

Around 1850 many public figures in Madras believed that Tamil,having suffered centuries of neglect, was in deep decline and in needof deliverance from some quarter. For the advocates of Tamil lan-guage reform, that solution lay in a modern Tamil prose, modeledafter English. This position was taken by the Campaign for a NewVernacular, a mid-century association of British and Tamilreformers, including Bruce Norton (President of the Board of Madras




University) and later G. Subramaniya Iyer (editor of The Hindu andSwadesamitran). For others, who blamed Sanskrit (and later English,to a certain extent) for the destitute condition of Tamil, the answerwas a revival of old Tamil. Toward the close of the century, thesevoices coalesced into the Pure Tamil Movement, so well documentedby Sumathi Ramaswamy’s recent book.85 What is not always appreci-ated, and what I have attempted to bring out here, is that long beforethe Pure Tamil Movement, Europeans took a similar position, blam-ing Sanskrit for the demise of Tamil and recommending a return, ifnot to ancient Tamil, at least to a pure substratum.

This model of corruption and redemption, as read into the legendof Valluvar, not only motivated programmes for language reform inthe nineteenth-century but also continues to influence Tamil literaryhistory written in the late twentieth-century. Kamil Zvelebil’s lastbook on Tamil literary history (1992) is a good case in point. In itZvelebil places enormous emphasis on the significance of ‘lost’ Tamilliterature, which he lays squarely at the feet of Brahmin ‘religiousfanaticism’ and ‘[m]ilitant Hinduism’.86 Zvelebil bases his account ofthis ‘loss and corruption’ of Tamil literature in the late medievalperiod primarily on two sources. One is Gover’s 1871 book (discussedabove), from which Zvelebil selects this passage:

It is almost impossible [writes Gover] now to obtain a printed copy of anyearly Tamil book that has not been systematically corrupted and mutilated. . . Indigenous poetry . . . was hidden under a load of corruption . . . TheBrahmans corrupted what they could not destroy.87

After quoting this extract as if it were reliable literary history, Zvele-bil then concedes that Gover ‘exaggerates’ but still maintains thatmuch of what he says is true because we have ‘several independentwitnesses for it’.88 As one of those reliable witnesses, Zvelebil quotesfrom Taylor’s 1835 summary of the Mackenzie manuscripts. Ineffect, Zvelebil’s late twentieth-century literary history recycles theallegory of loss, decadence and salvation that underpinned the Vallu-var legend and the writing of literary history in thenineteenth-century.

85 Ramaswamy 1997.86 Zvelebil 1992:36, 46.87 Gover’s sustained and far-ranging critique of Brahmins’ deceit and theft (‘The

Brahmans have corrupted what they could not destroy’ [1871, 14]) is rivalled onlyby the virtuoso performances of DMK orators in the next century.

88 Zvelebil 1992:47.




The other source for Zvelebil’s narrative of corruption andredemption is a survey of Tamil literature in the nineteenth-century(Ventakacuvami 1962). It is from this book that Zvelebil obtains hiscase against two Saiva Brahmins (seventeenth/eighteenth-century)who proscribed the reading and teaching of pre-bhakti Tamil texts.89

They, Zvelebil claims, are responsible in large part for the ‘militantHinduism’ and ‘religious fanaticism’ which resulted in the loss of somany early Tamil texts. Reading this source book, one sees thetheme of corruption and redemption assume cataclysmic propor-tions. ‘This attitude [Saiva proscription of pre-bhakti texts]’, writesVenkatacuvami, ‘was the fundamental reason for the total destruc-tion of old Tamil civilisation, arts and culture’.90 But, the authorconsoles us, a ‘new dawn’ (nalla kalam) was soon to come. This newage, when past corruption was redeemed by salvaging an even moreancient age, came in the second half of the nineteenth-century,which witnessed the printing of the lost classics. And this period, asany history of Tamil literature will inform us, is known as the ‘TamilRenaissance’. If Gover saw a Reformation at work, others found aRenaissance.

Literary history in nineteenth-century India was a field of know-ledge substantially influenced by Europeans and the colonial state,though the extent of that influence is often exaggerated. In the southIndian context at least, the colonial impact was filtered through apre-existing, though never static, debate about the origins of Tamiland its position vis-a-vis Sanskrit. The Tirukkural., written after theSangam poems but before the bhakti movement, was a contentioustext in Tamil literary history long before Europeans came to India.Directed to this extremely popular text and its legend by Tamil tra-dition, Europeans found a story that allowed them to participate inand influence debates about Tamil literary history. In Valluvar’s lowbirth, the Europeans discovered a hero of their own making; in hisecumenical teaching, the Europeans’ pursuit of an acceptable Indianreligion coalesced with a Tamil desire to imagine a past independentof Brahminical control, rituals and texts. In Valluvar’s triumph atMadurai, the outsiders’ need to view (south) India as an ancient andfallen, yet redeemable culture matched the need felt by many Tamilintellectuals for a literary history that rescued a pure Tamil from adecadent Sanskrit.

89 Such a proscription, quoted in textual form, however, is no proof that a ‘ban’was ever in practice or that it was effective.

90 Venkatacuvami 1962:80.




The Valluvar legend can only be fully understood, however, in thecontext of other Tamil literary histories. While there is no grandnarrative of Tamil literary history, a common feature is that compet-ing narratives differ according to the positions taken on the issue ofTamil’s relation to Sanskrit. Some texts explain that Tamil and San-skrit were the two heads of Siva’s creative drum; others state that thetwo languages sprang from Siva’s two eyes. But the most influentialnarrative is the story of Agastya, who is said to have brought to thesouth both Sanskrit and Tamil. Some versions claim that Agastyacreated Tamil, others that he first learned it from Siva; one of hisdisciples was Tolkappiyar, to whom the earliest Tamil grammar isattributed. The Agastya story, in other words, is an origin myth forthe Tamil language, just as the Valluvar story is an origin myth forTamil literature.91 But the origin in the Agastya myth is mixed—anorthern derivation for the southern tongue—an ambivalence whichsome tellings of the Valluvar legend attempt to resolve with anunambiguously non-Brahmin poet’s decisive victory at Madurai.

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the legend of valluvar and tamil literary history

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