INTRODUCTION

THE ANCIENT LITERATURE of the Tamils, like the literature of the ancient Greeks, impresses one not so much by the bulk, range and variety of the works that have been preserved for us, as by the comparative novelty and compelling nature of its contents, and by the light that it throws on the hoary and characteristic culture of the southern part of Peninsular India. What Goethe said of literature in general is also true of Tamil. “Literature is a fragment of a fragment; of all that ever happened or has been said, but a fraction has been written, and of this but little is extant”.¹ With Greek and Latin, Tamil shares the misfortune of having lost the vast portion of its ancient literature, but while Greek and Latin have yet their dramas, epics, and historical, philosophical and forensic prose, it is almost exclusively the lyric and heroic and bardic poetry of ancient Tamil that has survived. Yet what has escaped the ravages of time, though not even a hundredth of the actual output,² reveals elements so original and fresh in the history of literature, and throws such new light on the history of a portion of the world, that to study the literary features of ancient literature or to describe the world as it was at the age of Aśoka, or Alexander, or Augustus, it would not be sufficient to take count only of Greek and Latin, and Sanskrit and Chinese. It would be necessary to consider Tamil as well.

During the last two centuries some European scholar or other of nearly every generation has paid Tamil the tribute.

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¹  Goethe quoted in The New Dictionary of Thoughts, subject Literature, New York, 1936.

² On the antiquity and extent of ancient Tamil literature, see K. S.Srinivasa Pillai, History of Tamil (Tm), pp. 1-41, Madras, 1922; T. R,Sesha Iyengar, Dravidian India,pp. 79 ff, and 166 ff, Madras, 1925; K.N.Sivaraja Pillai, The Chronology of the Early Tamils, Madras, 1932; A. Chidambaranatha Chettiar, Advanced Studies in Tamil Prosody, Annamalainagar, 1943, in which the antiquity may be examined from a new angle, namely, prosody. On the characteristics of ancient Tamil Poetry, seeSwami Vedachalam, Ancient and Modern Tamil Poets, Pallavaram, 1939.