This work comprises a project I had in mind for quite some time and which has now been approved by the International Institute of Tamil Studies. Dr. A. N. Perumal, the Director, needs my thanks for his concurrence that the Kural which has seen the light of many translations and interpretations, both from Indian and Western scholars, should now be rescued from the moralistic and platitudinous approaches of the past.
My work in this undertaking will therefore apply the proper and, in my view, the only perspective to its understanding as the Tamil people's most valuable and sociologically most significant work intended to reach thit world through the medium of the payche without neglees of the necessary functions of the body.
This undertaking also meets a long-felt need which is to bring this most valuable and significant work of Thiruvalluvar within the focus of:
(a) modern sociological thinking culminating in Marxism.
(b) enlarging the scope and application of (a) so that the understanding is broadened to embrace the larger and more more comprehensive norm called aram.
(c) the proper field of psychology so that the totally erroneous translations of certain chapters undertaken so far by Western and Indian scholars are corrected without delay.
The time has come, I feel, when the realities of the psychic life as understood in modern psychology have to be applied to any proper understanding of kural-more especially of the first few chapters-so that this unique inheritance in Tamil can become the needed and only thing to overthrow the existing order and bring about renewal.
This book entitled "Thiruk-kural The Daylight of the Psyche" by Mr. C. Rajasingham of this Institute is to be greatly welcomed in Tamil Nadu. The reasons are not far to seek.
The Kural has seen the light of many interpreters and translators, both Indian and Western. Of course, for the greater part, the moral and ethical elements had been stressed by commentators and the translations too have endeavoured to turn what Valluvar had in mind into moralistic injunctions or precepts.
Our author as well as commentator, Mr. Rajasingham, has taken a more scientific view adopting the sociological and psychological methodologies of contemporary writing. In Kural there is to be found the only sound doctrine of social life as well as a theory of government which elevates man because it stuck to universal principles.
This book, I am sure, will be a guide for a long time to come of the proper way of evaluating a great tradition such as Tamil. It has thus become all the more necessary that the wisdom enshrined in Tamil-(greater than anything which classical Greece has given and for that matter even Sanskrit) should emerge once again as guide to the destinies of mankind. Suoh a destiny can only become the liberating power from all the confusions and shambles of the present era.
An introduction to Thiru-Valluvar and his work Thiru Kural is difficult because it calls for entire rendering of Tamil history down the ages, perhaps through many millenia of the civilized life of the Tamil people. Since the history is more sacred than profane, which there fore gives it the ageless character, we are liberated from the modern and peculiarly profane point of view. That enables more appropriate renderings and assessments than would be available to the purely scholastic aud modern approaches. In tee latter are perhaps available points of view which must reflect our own abnormalities, caught as we are in the speed which events today are being in unfolded as well as distorted.
The Kural of Valluvar is the entirety of the Tamil life which, though rolled into a past, present and future, is an ever-present Now over riding all time and space perceptions. That is why when the name of Valluvar or Kural is mentioned there is a response even from the (most ignorant Tamil and this comes from the depth of his being.
Unlike Taoism, for example, which was pure metaphysic and reserved for an elite, the Tamil man's social and economic life was religious only in the special sense conveyed by Kural.
It transcended even the remotest thought of or involvement in self-interest so that the social order developed a coherence and validity no longer seen in modern societies.
Tamil Nadu was at one time part and parcel of a larger geographical and cultural conglomerate until the time of the Lemurian cataclysm. Even today the influence of Tamil is seen in vast regions of South-East Asia and some recent scholars have referred to Tamil embassies in foreign courts including that of Augustus. The language was so universal as to drive home the concept of a goal and desting for mankind away from notions of division and even self interest which other languages are wont to create.
**Contents and Sample Pages**
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