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TULASI-PRAJÑA, Oct.-December, 1991
last ie., Mokşa-Liberation, Perfection or Final Beautitude being precisely implied in the First part itself).
Owing to lack of exact information about the author and also for want of either precise internal evidence or external references etc., the date of this classic could not be pinpointed; and hence scholars, basing their studies with different angles of vision, have tried to fix different dates for it. We find that generally three dates have been proposed Some scholars hold that it is c. 100 A. D. Some c.300 A. D. and some others c.600 A. D.: (i) Those, like Prof. A. Chakravarti Naynar, associating the author of the Kural with the Jaina Sage Elācārya, and also those others identifying the work with the classic of great antiquity or belonging to the pre-Sangam Age, assign it to c. 100 A. D. (and even a little earlier). (ii) But Prof. Meenaxisundaram places it not earlier than 300 A. D. presenting the following observations; It is difficult to fix the date of the Kural. But one may point out that Tiruvalluvar may not have written the stylized language of Sangam poets, which could not be the language of the common people of the day, and he, in ecletic attitude, must have preferred to write in the natural language of the day. In any case one cannot place the Tirukkural much later than 300 A. D., for it preserves certain aspects of the older language inspite of its acceptance of new developments in the language. (iii) But Prof. S. Vaiyapuri pillai proposes 600 A. D. as the date of the Kural, placing it after the great Tamil grammatic work Tolkāppiyam and advancing the following reasons: Kural is later than Tolkäppiyam. Linguistic considerations too strengthen this conclusion. There is a higher percentage of Sanskrit words in the Kural than in early Sangam Works and in the Tolkäppiyam. New forms of functional words appear in the Kural for the first time in the history of Tamil language.
The author of the Kural is known as Tiruvalluvar (tiru being an honourific prefix). But very little is known about this great and noble poet-philosopher. For want of exact information about him, several anecdotes, folk-tales and traditions have come up about him and around some aspects of his life. He is associated with Madurai region by some and with Mylapore near Madras by others. In some places a vallvar is known as a product of a Brahmin by a Harijan (low-caste) woman. The term valluvar also refers (as found in the Manimekhalai, another Tamil classic) to a low class community and is applied to the king's officers or men, announcing the royal proclamations to the public all round the capital city, sitting on the
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