[3][4] In the patikam (the prologue) to the poem, Ilango Adigal identifies himself as the brother of the Chera king Cenkuttuvan (c. late 2nd century CE[5]).

The dating of Ilango Adigal, the author, to early historic south India, or the Sangam period, is doubtful because the Fifth Ten, Patitruppattu Collection, dated to early historic south India, provides a biography of Cenkuttuvan, his royal family and rule, but never mentions that the king had a brother who became an ascetic or wrote an epic composition.

[7] However, Zvelebil explains later: "Those who distrust the colophons to Patirrupattu, as well as who tried to prove that the 3rd book of Cilappatikaram was almost a late forgery, have committed one very basic fallacy they thought that late material was necessarily unauthentic, their utterly false contention was that the content of a work could not be older than its form"The author does appear as a character in the very end of poem (the last canto of the epic, lines 155-178, mentions "I also went in [...]", whose "I" scholars have assumed to be the author Ilango Adigal).

[17] The author was likely not a prince, nor had anything to do with the Chera dynasty, says scholar R. Parthasarathy, and these lines may have been added to the epic to give the text a high pedigree status, gain royal support, and to "institutionalize the worship of goddess Pattini and her temples" in the Tamil regions (modern Kerala and Tamil Nadu) as is described in the poem.

[9] Scholar Obeyesekere considers the epic's claims of Gajabahu, the ruler of Sri Lanka, and the kinship between Ilango Adigal and Senguttuvan to be "ahistorical", and that these portions are likely "a late interpolation" into the poem.