PREFACE.

Among the rich and varied forms of Poetic composition extant in the Tamil language, the Dramatic type so conspicuous in Sanscrit and English, does not seem to find a place. The play here submitted to the Public is a humble attempt to see whether the defect may not be easily removed. Written during intervals of business and amidst diverse distractions, the work falls indeed much beneath the author’s own ideal, but is is nevertheless published in the hope, that though it may not be a success in itself, it may incite more scholarly and more fortunate attempts in the same direction. In the present condition of neglect into which the vernacular languages of this Presidency have fallen, ‘the hope here expressed may appear to many altogether visionary. It may be said ‘There is no demand even for what literature there exists. The School going population care for nothing but what is prescribed each year by the University or other educational authorities and the inevitable annotations on what is so prescribed. The English educated elders have no time or inclination to read anything but what is placed before them in easy English, and the purely native Pundit is already so rare a bird that the country will have to be congratulated, if in the course of the next two or three generations, he be not counted among the extinct species.’ No doubt there is much truth in such melancholy representations of the immediate prospects of the Tamil language; but Love is given to hope. No labour of love waits for demand or is hampered by considerations of its own fruitlessness, and perhaps, in this reflection will be found the best justification for the present publication.

   The play here submitted, it is needless to say, is meant for the study room and not the stage, and it is therefore written in the literary and not altogether the colloguial dialect. In aiming however at grammatical accuracy, the author trusts he has not fallen into the opposite vice of classical obscurity. Every endeavour has been made so to regulate the style, as to enable an average Matriculate, not guilty of having altogether neglected his Tamil, to follow the work with ease and interest, provided he has a good Tamil Dictionary. It will be also observed that the metre used is the simplest in the language and the nearest approach to the English Blank verse,