Tirukkural translations

Tirukkural, also known as the Kural, an ancient Indian treatise on the ethics and morality of the commoner, is one of the most widely translated non-religious works in the world.

The Kural text, considered to have been written in the 1st century BCE,[2] remained unknown to the outside world for close to one and a half millennia.

The Kural text has enjoyed a universal appeal right from antiquity owing to its secular and non-denominational nature that it suited the sensibilities of all.

[4] The universality is such that, despite its having been written in the pre-Christian era, almost every religious group in India and across the world, including Christianity, has claimed the work for itself.

In 1886, George Uglow Pope published the first complete English translation in verse by a single author, which brought the Kural text to a wide audience of the western world.

Thus, no translation can perfectly reflect the true nature of any given couplet of the Kural unless read and understood in its original Tamil form.

[18] Added to this inherent difficulty is the attempt by some scholars to either read their own ideas into the Kural couplets or deliberately misinterpret the message to make it conform to their preconceived notions, a problem of Hermeneutics.

[7] In August 2022, the governor of Tamil Nadu, R. N. Ravi, criticized Anglican Christian missionary G. U. Pope for "translating with the colonial objective to 'trivialise' the spiritual wisdom of India," resulting in a "de-spiritualised version" of the Kural text.