Part III—Love
After considering the subject of Politics which claims such a large portion of the activities of man, the poet comes to treat of the third of the four great objectives of life, namely Love. The whole part is taken by the great commentators of the Kural as the romance of a single couple from the time when they meet each other for the first time up to the time when they reunite after a temporary separation from one another. But for one or two stanzas which may not appear to fit exactly with this scheme, all the 250 verses do lend themselves to this explanation. Of course each verse can also be considered as describing an isolated situation and containing a delicate analysis of one of the hundred varying moods of the lover’s heart. The most ardent admirers of “Locksley Hall” will have to admit that the Tamil poet is easily the superior of Tennyson in analysing the infinite number of moods that chase each other in the agitated minds of lovers.
The romance begins with the accidental meeting of a young man and a damsel in a grove. It is a case of love at first sight. They plight their words to one another and enter the married state. No rites are gone through but the simple plighting of the faith, but that was sufficient in the heroic age of Tamil society to legalise the marriage. It corresponds exactly to the Gândharva marriage of the Sanskrit Dharma Shâstras. The marriage however is kept secret by the lovers and they are at first inclined to wait for a favourable opportunity to make it public. But neither the husband nor the wife have sufficient patience to wait for that opportunity. They are impatient to rush to each other’s arms (1131 and 1138) before the minds of the parents and relations of the girl can be prepared to receive the news of their secret marriage. But lovers in the Tamil land had perfected in the course of ages an ingenious machinery to stead them under a dilemma of this kind. The lover undergoes a sort of martyrdom both physical and moral in order to induce the people of the village and the parents of his ladylove to pity his distraction and offer him of their own accord the object of his passion. A few branches of the palmyra tree are joined together so as to enable a man to sit astride on the united plank, the lover sits on it, and a number of his friends carry him in that posture into the village singing passionate songs of love. The edges of the palmyra branches being rough and hard, the “riding of the palmyra stalk” or the palmyra “horse,” as it is called, is a veritable penance. The young folks of the village mock at the lovelorn pilgrim and perhaps refer to the object of his passion by name even (Ch. 115). The outcry reaches the ears of the parents and other relations of the maiden in the village. They reproach her for entering into matrimony without their consent (1147), but there is no remedy now but to give their consent, and everything ends happily for the lovers. The idea of the “palmyra horse” may be compared with the following verses of the Twelfth Night, I. v:—
Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house
With loyal cantons of contemned love,
And sing them loud even in the dead of night,
Holla your name to the reverberate hills
And make the babbling gossip of the air
Cry out, Olivia!
Now the pair live a happy married life for some time, but the husband has soon to part for the wars from which, he tells his wife, he would soon return laden with glory and wealth. The wife cannot bear even the thought of separation. She will surely die if he leaves her. “If there is anything about not parting, speak it to me: but if it is only thy speedy return, tell it to those who will survive till then.” (1151). But he persuades her to allow him to part, and goes away. Wars and battles, however, do not hurry on to an end for the sake of young ladies, and the husband does not return within the appointed time. The pangs and pains of the wife’s lovesickness are described by the poet in 11 beautiful chapters, all the verses of which are gems sparkling with the light of fancy or expressing some of the tenderest emotions of the love-oppressed heart. The husband at last returns. The wife at first sulks because of his overstay, but cannot really withstand the passion of her heart to clasp him to her arms. Bouderie as one of the incidents of married life is described in three beautiful chapters, which are the last of the book; and as you read them you almost see the pouting lips and indignant eyes, and hear the hard words of the wife to the husband. But every pet ends in a petting which is only the more enjoyable for the quarrel that preceded it. For “bouderie is the salt of love.”
It is because the second section deals with the actions and feelings of the chaste wife in the absence of her lord that the author has given it the title of Chastity.
The above is a very inadequate description of the treasure which the reader will find spread out before him by the poet for his enlightenment as well as enjoyment in the 133 chapters of his book. Whether he speaks of moral duties or state policy, of the principles of action to be followed in order to succeed in life, or of the varying emotions in the trembling hearts of lovers, everywhere Thiruvalluvar has sounded the utmost depths of human thought. The prophets of the world have not emphasised the greatness and power of the Moral Law with greater insistence or force; Bhîshma or Kauṭilya or Kâmandaka or Râm Dâs or Vishnu Sharman or Macchiavelli have no more subtle counsel to give on the conduct of the State; “Poor Richard” has no wiser saw for the raising up of clever businessmen; and Kâlidâsa or Shakespeare have no deeper knowledge of the lovers’ heart and its varied moods; than this pariah weaver of Mylapore! Such is the universality of mind of this grand seer who was born in the Tamil country but who belongs to all mankind.
When one has read his book through, the one impression that abides in the mind is that virtue and honour and manliness triumph over everything, and that vice and degradation are to be eschewed even should they bring pleasure and profit. This is the master-thought that runs through the whole book “even as the thread that is seen through the crystal bead.” Certain verses in the Second Part, like 830 for example, may look as if they would take away a little from this high praise. But we must understand that the author makes a clear distinction between private morality and State necessity. In private life, for instance, forgiveness is one of the greatest virtues and chapter 16 sings its praises abundantly. But, for the king as the representative of the State it is only a limited virtue. He must punish the guilty as a matter of course. Not only that. When he has an enemy, he is not to sit quiet, allowing him to grow in power and strength, but he must attack and subdue him before he becomes strong enough to menace him seriously (879). And when a neighbouring prince defies him, he should not forgive him but humble his pride at once (880). But all the same, the king and the State have not a carte blanche to do what they please with regard to their subjects or their neighbours. They shall not think of acquiring even kingdoms by means for which they shall have to blush (1016). And “to try to lay by wealth by means of guile is like trying to preserve water in a pot of clay that is not baked” (660).
While admiring the high moral purpose and the sublime ethics of Thiruvalluvar, Christian writers, actuated by what we may call for want of a better term a spell of religious chauvinism, cannot resist the temptation of making use of this very moral elevation of the poet to attack the religions of India in an insidious manner. Dr. Pope repeats in substance what Beschi, Digot, and others have written, and speaks of the Kural as “the one oriental book, much of whose teaching is an echo of the Sermon on the Mount,” and says of the author, “Without doubt Christian influences most affected him … we see in Thiruvalluvar a noble, truth-loving and devout man, feeling in the darkness after God, if haply he might find him.” And in another place, with a patronising air towards the great sage and his people he remarks, “I suppose he was not satisfied with the glimpses he had obtained of man’s future, and awaited for light; or, perhaps, he thought his people not prepared for higher teaching.” The reverend gentleman insinuates in these and similar remarks that Thiruvalluvar’s book could not have been so moral in its tone but for his having listened to the doctrines of Christ from the descendants of those who must have, according to a scarcely credible theory, received the teachings of the Apostle St. Thomas at Mylapore.
Writing as Thiruvalluvar does on almost all things that concern man’s life here as well as hereafter, it is easy to find parallels to his maxims among the greater writers of almost every nation in the world. But that is no reason for at once jumping to the conclusion that he must have listened to the words of any sage in particular. Whatever be the truth as to St. Thomas having preached at Mylapore, the author of the Kural does not show that he has ever heard of any of the peculiar doctrines of Christianity. Christians have a tendency to think that the ideas of forgiving one’s enemies, abstaining from returning evil for evil, humility etc. have been first taught to the world only by Jesus Christ. To say that these ideas are not autochthonous to any great nation that has developed a distinct civilisation of its own, one must possess a much greater amount of learning than falls to the lot of the ordinary man. But it can be safely asserted that these ideas were the common property of great minds at least four centuries before Jesus was born. And Thiruvalluvar had enough in the sacred literature of India, to say nothing of his own Illumined Self, to enable him to build these truths in his grand scheme of life without being indebted in any way to the teachings of Jesus.
So again among Hindus, Buddhists and Jains and Shaivas are each fond of asserting that the sage belonged to their own particular persuasion. But if every one of these religions can claim many of his teachings as its own, none of them can deny that they also belong to its rivals. And each of them will find it difficult to reconcile some of his ideas with its orthodox doctrines. For instance, almost all the names by which Thiruvalluvar refers to the Lord in his first chapter apply distinctively to the Buddha and to the Arhat of the Jains. But the Jains have to find an explanation for his reference to a creator of the universe (1062), for the high regard that he has for the sacred character of the Brahmans, their Gods, their sacrifices, and their Vedas (543, 560, 413, 134), for his Brahman division of life into four states (41), and for his attributing of anger to ascetics (29). The Buddhists have to explain his reference to the five principles of matter (271) while they admit only four, his approval of self-mortification and austerities (Ch. 27), and his condemnation of the eating of meat (Ch. 26). On the other hand, neither Shiva nor Vishnu nor any other God of the Hindu pantheon is by name spoken of as the supreme God anywhere in the book. The truth therefore appears to be that in whatever persuasion Thiruvalluvar had been born, he freed himself from the trammels of all sects and worked his way up to the Illuminated Existence of the Yogin for whom there are no persuasions or sects or religions, but only Truth and Wisdom and Joy.