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Preface to the Second Edition
The first edition of this work was published in November, 1923 and 500 copies of it were sold within four years - a period too short for the sale of a Tamil book of this kind which in contradis- tinction to the current fashion for a mixed kind of Tamil prose, is written in a scrupulously pure Tamil style, setting forth at the same time views of a revolutionary character in the sphere of social, religious and historical ideas of the Tamil people. In point of truth the views themselves are neither strange nor revolutionary, being the outcome of a comparative study carefully made of both Tamil and Sanscritr literature. If they appear strange surely they must appear so, to many it is because their knowledge is partial: and where that knowledge claims to be derived from the literatures of the two languages, it does not go beyond the pale of modern Puranic literature of the two.
No doubt, beneath the legendary accounts of Puranas critics of trenchant intellect - such are rarely to be met with in this coun- try, may detect facts of great value for studying the history of an- cient people, but others, who are untrained in the critical and his- torical methods of looking at things and events, take every bit of them as so many literal truths. People in every country, befopre they get the benefits of an excellent education, are moree credu- lous than children, since children cannot rest satisfied in a blind belief with respect to a certain thing or an occurrence, unless they receive satisfying answers to all they want to know about the one or the other. This, the self-interested persons know full well and such of them as are versed in the knowledge of a language know also how to work upon the people's fancy by making that language as a medium for their artifices. This was how the huge body of
