Studies in Cola History and Administration c6.9

c6.9

It must also be observed at the outset that the same scholar drew attention † to the fact that the learned annotator Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar himself found a difficulty in following the system adopted in the grammatical notes which formed part of the colophons of the Puraṉāṉūṟu verses. The divergence between the system of the Tolkāppiyam and that followed in the colophons was accounted for by Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar on the supposition that some writers had followed by mistake systems of grammar later than the Tolkāppiyam and the Agattiyam which alone, in his opinion, applied to the anthologies. It is needless for us to accept this explanation though his opinion that the notes on the Puraṉāṉūṟu verses did not follow the Tolkāppiyam registers a fact which may turn out to be of importance in deciding the question of the authenticity of these notes. The Tolkāppiyam, despite its name and the tradition about its mythical antiquity, betrays signs of not being absolutely the earliest work in the Tamil language; it is quite possible that a critical study of the linguistic and sociological data embedded in the 1600 sūtras of this cyclopaedic work may establish a relatively late date for it. A slight investigation of the employment of finite verbal forms ending in ‘undu’ in the Puraṉāṉūṟu has led one scholar † to the conclusion that some of the verses in that collection are anterior to the Tolkāppiyam in time. The divergence between the grammatical notes to the *Puram* verses and the system of the *Tolkāppiyam* must, on this line of argument, be accounted for on a hypothesis which would be the reverse of that employed by Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar. There is nothing intrinsically wrong about suggesting such an antiquity to the *Puram* collection, though it is a fact that we have no information about the compiler or his time. For in one instance, that of the *Kalittogai*, we have evidence of the collection having been put together by Nallanduvaṉār, one of the poets represented in the collection itself; and this shows that *a priori* assumptions on the length of time that intervened between the actual composition of the poems and the time when they were brought together in an anthology or their colophons supplied may not be as sound as they appear.