![]() As he relates his interpretational odyssey which involved years of effort, he shows refreshing candour in speaking of the scholarly help he got in achieving his end. Some like C Rajendran, author of the three-part ‘Paamararkkum Parimelazhagar’, a retired revenue officer who became obsessed with mastering Parimelazhagar’s commentary, are working to make the text accessible to the lay reader. ![]() ![]() It is this uprooting that present-day seekers of the spirit of the ‘Thirukkural’ try to set right through renewed study of Parimelazhagar’s commentary. In the process of injecting rationalistic egalitarianism into interpretations of the Kural, modern-day renditions wrenched it out of its rich cultural, philosophical and spiritual underpinnings. This trend began in the 1920s though it was Pulavar Kuzhandhai’s 1949 commentary which was touted as the first ‘rationalist’ version. Though the motivations for such biases are manifold, one of the prime reasons was the Dravidian movement that sought to stigmatise Parimelazhagar’s commentary as espousing ‘varnashrama dharma’ and giving importance to Sanskrit works. In his work ‘Thirukkural Urai Vipareetham’, professor Sami Thiagarajan gives a graphic description of some 20th century ‘Thirukkural’ commentaries which take a distortive approach to it.
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