This manuscript is the famed Tirukkural, the sacred corpus of couplets which were written on human thought, ethics, political and economic matters, and love. Interestingly, the classical text does not carry his name – its translator, Monsieur Ariel, described that Tirukkural is ‘the book without a name by an author without a name,’ and it was only later with the Shaivite Tamil text Tiruvalluva Maalai that a sense of provenance could be established. This is also what makes reading this ‘panchaloha’ bronze image even more fascinating, that we are at an unfortunate point where authentic information about Valluvar’s life is extremely difficult to come by. Authoritative scholarship of thinkers like Kamil Zvelebil and Purnalingam Pillai have declared that most ‘traditional’ accounts concerning his life are myths. Notwithstanding such problems, what we nevertheless have with us is a glorious image of a saint that has been revered in Jainism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, and whose masterpiece – comparable to the Bible, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the works of Plato – is highly aphoristic, revolutionary, and authoritative.
