INTRODUCTION
Of the time-honoured firifurcation of Tamil Literature into Verše, Music, and the Drama, the last has saw or no representatives while the first and the second have many. The positive want of ancient dramatic literature has been accounted for by the lovers of Tamil in various ways, which seem more or less fabulous to those who have any tincture of English education. That the Tamilspeaking population have included the histrionic art among the degraded arts of life, fit to be pursued by the wandering nomads, or by the dregs of societies, seems to point to the conclusion that the art should in course of time have degenerated and fallen into disrepute or lacked cultivation at the hands of men of genius. In either case, any attempt in that direction in these days of western culture cannot but add to the reputation of one who, with the necessary intellectual equipment, energy, and zeal, devotes his mights and days to it.
In Madras, as in the Mofussil, we often come across travelling troops of actors amusing audience with a variety of plays based on the three great magazines of poetic fiction, Ramayanam, Bharatam, and Kandapuranam. They are for the most part comical, and abound in vulgar conceits and voluptuous Songs, gratifying to the vicious, but bearing no literary value.
If any drama has seen the light, that mingles interest with instruction, it is the excellent Manonmaniyam, by the late lamented Professor Sundaram Pillai, M.A., published a few years ago. Eminently classical as it is in diction, metre, and matter, it is simply excellent in characterisation and plot evolution, and will do well on the boards.
As a drama, what Manonmaniyam is in verse, Rupawati is in prose. Though it is no praise to say that both are free from the Pigeon-Tamil which obtains so much even among the Scholars of Southern India, who however imbued with western knowledge and stirred up by western example from their wonted lethargy to a sense of national literature, only pander to the tastes of the low and the vulgar, our new-fledged writers would do well to consult, the choice and chaste diction of these two dramas if they would provide for their earnest readers opportunities of knowing what the classical Tamil is, and what great purposes it can be made to serve. Our Sastriar has in Rupawati pressed into his service, whenever necessary, the felicities of Tamil diction, pure and unmixed, and given the reading public not only an intellectual feast but so vivid a portraiture of the ways and manners of princes and people of the age of the literary Witenagemot in Madura that their imagination cannot but be quickened, exalted, and ennobled. If he has succeeded in this, as I Yêrily believe he has, Rupawati fulfils the mission it was intended to fulfil,
