Thamizhaham, adorned with Nature's choicest gifts of beauty and ennobled with one of the most ancient and yet unbroken lines of literary traditions, has produced a galaxy of great poets who can take their place with pride in the Universal brotherhood of poets. Apart from their numerous master-pieces of classical poems, which, in richness of literary beauty and universality of appeal, are a standing source of envy and emulation to the rest of the world, these great children of the Tamil Muse have bequeathed to posterity an unbounded treasure in the form of stray and occasional stanzas of great merit. Some of these have been collected and published as anthologies under the caption “Thanippadal” on different occasions by different compilers. There is still a vast amount of unpublished poetic pieces of this category, preserved in palm leaf manuscripts in the Sarasvati Mahal and elsewhere. The Library has planned to print and publish as many of them as possible and to make them available to the Tamil reading public. Pulavar S. Balasundaram of Karanthai Pulavar Kalloori has undertaken on our behalf this pleasant but difficult task of compiling, from the several manuscripts, the unpublished stray stanzas of several Tamil poets and of editing them with a lucid rendering of the substance. The difficulties which he had to surmount in collecting the manuscripts and in sifting the published verses from the unpublished ones have been set out in his own preface. The Administrative Committee of the Library is indeed thankful to the learned Editor for his commendable performance. It is our hope to continue this edition of Thanippadal Thirattu in another volume, even now under preparation. We are thankful to the Curator of the Government Oriental Manuscript Library, Madras for having kindly lent us for our collation, comparison and selection, the transcribed copy of the manuscript of Thanippadal Thirattu from his library. I am sure that the vast number of readers of Tamil language and literature will join the authorities of the T. M. S. S. M. Library, Thanjavur in voicing forth their deep sense of indebtedness to the Government of Madras for their financial aid to the Library for publishing this and other similar unprinted works. It is our fervent hope and prayer that the Government may come forth with greater and greater aid in future to unearth the vast treasures in this library in larger numbers and at quicker pace.
From among the many manuscripts which still lie unearthed in the shelves of the Sarasvati Mahal Library Thanjavur, we are offering some stray verses to the students and scholars of Tamil through this volume. Apart from the coherent and sustained poetical compositions, the great poets of the past gave utterance to a number of incidental and occasional stanzas of which some have a great beauty of general thoughts in their isolation. This is because they did not write poetry, but they spoke poetry and breathed poetry. Poetry to them, was not an avocation or a pastime, but a way of living. They "lisped in numbers and numbers came". The T. M. S. S. M. Library has among its codices a considerable collection of such poems which are known as Thanippadal. An anthology of 216 such stanzas, which have not been brought to light before, were selected and published by the Library as the first part of Thanippadal Thirattu in the year 1967. It is now followed up with the second part, which, we hope, would be received with appreciation and delight by the public. In order to make it useful to the lay, as well as to the scholarly reader, a simple prose rendering with brief contextual references, wherever available, has been added, as in the previous part, by our learned and experienced editor. The Administrative Committee is thankful to Pulavar S. Balasundaram for his having edited the work in such a useful and scholarly manner, adding his lucid prose rendering to the verses. Our thanks are due to the Curator, Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Madras for his kind loan of the transcribed copy of the manuscript of the Thanippadal collection in his library and for having permitted us to select from it some verses which were not found in our collection. We wish to record here what is always present in our mind, namely our gratitude to the Government of Tamil Nadu for their munificent recurring grant for the publications of the Library, but for which such publications would have to remain as a mere wishful thinking. It is our fervent hope that we may widen our publication activities in the future, with the greater encouragement and aid of the Government and with the fuller appreciation and co-operation of scholars.
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