One of my most cherished possessions was a T-shirt, hand-painted by a friend, that said simply: "Mirabai Lived." It was a typo; she had meant "Mirabai Lives", but I preferred the accidental version.
"Mirabai Lived" was a reminder that historical figures had once been alive; that the past is never frozen in amber. Reading Gopalkrishna Gandhi's crackling introduction to a new English version of The Tirukkural (Aleph Classics), I felt reminded of the same simple fact: that Valluvar, far from being an abstract name, a poet set on a pedestal, had once been as alive as any of us.
"No stone tells us, nor any ancient leaf, whether he was a sage or a minister, teacher, soldier or even king." But reading his famous couplets, Gandhi draws closer to Valluvar: he knew what poverty meant, he lived along the coast and "knew his sea for sure", he knew animals, birds and plants well, he had compassion "in a very modern, very humane way".
For Tamil readers, this translation of the Tirukkural will stand perhaps as an unusual, often sparkling, addition to the translations already made by C Rajagopalachari and G U Pope. For the non-Tamil reader, especially for those unfamiliar with the 1,330 couplets of the Kural, Valluvar's fresh, pragmatic and sensual poetry will be a revelation.
For Indians who read in English, this has been a rich decade for poetry from the medieval and ancient world. Particularly stirring are the translations of poets by poets - Lal Ded (Ranjit Hoskote), Kabir (Arvind Krishna Mehrotra), an anthology of Bhakti poetry edited by Arundhati Subramaniam. Surdas's poems, The Therigatha and now The Tirukkural have found able translators in scholars. These translations cast ripples into our understanding of Indian thought; and besides, the poetry is beautiful.
The translator is often seen as an interpreter, but Gandhi's view has far more juice to it: "When smitten by a book, readers want to become part of it, immerse themselves in the life of the volume they hold in their hands… The most ambitious, even audacious, way of finding a union with the work - for that is what the smitten want - is to try translating it and thereby enter the work's very soul."
The three books of the Kural are a complete education. Being Good explores what it means to lead a virtuous life, sets down rules for domestic life, right speech, gratitude and self-control. Valluvar's meditations are positively contemporary: "Forgiving the wrongdoer, in life's book, has grace/ But forgetting the wrong itself has an even higher place."
I was initially uncomfortable with the neat rhymes, craving the occasional astringence of blank verse, but the rhythms soon become familiar, and welcome, as in this couplet: "The heart, the heart, it knows the true from the false.
It burns, yes, burns when falsehood breeds within its walls." This is a book to be read aloud, not to be read silently on the page.
Being Politic is where you see the worldly side of Valluvar emerge, and his advice to kings is shrewd, its sharp wisdom carrying down the ages, applicable to rulers in our time.
"The king guards his realm, yes, but who guards the king?
His sense of doing right by each and every thing
The king who isn't easy to reach is blinded by his biases
His nemesis is certain, whatever its shape and size is."
These warnings are followed by pragmatism of the highest order: "The spy must watch the king's foes, of course, but also his officers and kin…"
The third section, Being In Love, reveals yet another Valluvar, one capable of savouring, and lamenting the loss of, pleasures of temporary variance. This is the poetry of breathless seas, and love's iron-fastened door, and fatal glances. Behind it is Gandhi's warning murmur, that Periyar didn't think much of Valluvar's view of women, but that caution has to war with the Kural's ancient sweet-tasting nectar.
"His couplets, called 'Tamil's epigrams' read like Time's telegrams," Gandhi writes. "Telegrams speak in the words, signal in the gaps. Telegrams convey tidings both good and bad.
So do Valluvar's.
And they are always urgent."
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