மாணிக்கவாசகர் வரலாறும் காலமும் - 1
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one, not born brahminï even though his mind be imbued with the culturw of Europeanlearning, is scarcely free from this feeling of his caste-supremacy. His mind has becom so saturated with it that it has become part and parcel of his being. He cannot, therefore, brook the thought that anything excellent or original can exist outside the pale of the brahmin caste and brahmin literature. This Extremely self- conceited state of the brahmin mind has so frequently and so prominently shown itself in almost all branches of Sanscrit literature that it has not escaped even the admiring eyes of some great oriental scholars. Forced by its undue prominence, they have not disdained to a vow their disapproval of it. To quate one instance: Zenaide Ragozin onserves: "At a later period, the followers of Vasistha and his descendants represent the narrowly orthodos brahmanic school with its petty punctiliousness in the matter of forms, rites, observances, its intolerance of everything un-Aryan, its regid seperatism."1 It is no wonder then that Dr. Krishnaswamy should attempt, of course without success, to make the divine sage Thiruvalluvar, the most original of Tamil poets and ethical philosophers and the reputed author of the Sacred Kural, the crestjewel of Tamil Classics, a debtor to Kautilya whose existence prior to the first century A.D., the age of Thiruvalluvar, is still in dispute.1
Apart from such flaws - fortunately they are very few, the writing of Dr.Krishnaswamy dealing with the history of Tamil kings and poets, on the whole, a reliable source of valuable information, although the dates assigned by him to be Vaishnava Alwars are incorrect as is shown in the following work of mind.
Coming now to a few Tamil books and magazine articles that have appeared within the last one or two decades, treating of the history of Tamil literature, I find only two books which require special mention here, for in the whole range of the following work, no other views that what were advocated in the two, have had to be taken for a searching criticism and an elaborate discussion, In the course of his perusal, the reader cannot fail to notice the necessity which impels
