Studies in Cola History and Administration c6.23.2

c6.23.2

Srinivasa Aiyangar says * that Perundēvaṇār, a poet of the ninth century A. D. " seems to have taken a great interest in the collections of the poems of an earlier age, for he has provided introductory odes in praise of Śiva " to some of these collections. In the author's Tamil book on the Pallavas he states more definitely that Perundēvaṇār of the ninth century made the anthologies and provided them with introductory verses. Then again, it is not clear whether the colophons of the Puram are held to be all of them absolutely unreliable and useless for historical purposes, or whether only some of them are suspect for certain specific reasons, or whether, lastly, because some are demonstrably false, the rest have, for that reason, to be rejected. "The Puram as we have it," contends Mr. Srinivasa Aiyangar, "has besides,† (1) colophons indicating the particular occasions when each of the first two hundred and sixty-six odes were sung, (2) paraphrases of these two hundred and sixty-six odes and brief notes grammatical or interpretive (sic). The colophons stop where the paraphrases stop and probably both were done by an editor of the age when commentaries were composed on old Tamil poems, i. e., probably between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries.