III. UJJAIN IN AN ANCIENT TAMIL CLASSIC - PERUNKATAI* ‘Setting one foot at Kanchi, Another on the cool Ujjain fertile with water And the third on Ceylon will indeed turn round our Chola’s elephant with its first foot fixed at Uraiyur (the Chola capital)” —Muthollāyiram-49. [Paari Wilayam Edition (1962)] I Peruñkatai (Brhat Kathâ) is an ancient Tamil classic of the 6th Century A.D. which furnishes even anthropological information on Savoras and other tribes" was fortunately salvaged from decay by (Dr. U. V. Swāminātha Iyer) the great protector of Tamil manuscripts. It was first printed in 1924. It has had three successive editions in 1935, 1253 & 1968. The South India Saiva Siddhantha Publishing House which is regarded as the Oxford University Press of Tamilnadu has brought out a two volume edition of Peruńkatai which has an exhaustive commentry of late P. V. Somasundaranar in 1970, From the same publishing house we have a complete prose rendering of the epic. To introduce this valuable ancient Tamil classic one can do well to quote the following extracts from the critical assessment of it by Prof. T. P. Meenakshisundaram.”
- Paper presented in the Dravidic Studies section of the 26th All India Oriental Conference—Ujjain. .
