About Thiruvalluvar and the Thirukkural

Who was Thiruvalluvar?

Thiruvalluvar (திருவள்ளுவர்) is the poet credited with the Thirukkural. Almost nothing about his life can be confirmed from historical records. Even his name is descriptive: Thiru is an honorific, much like "revered", and Valluvar may point to a family or community name. Many of the stories told about him, such as his life as a weaver in Mylapore, in today's Chennai, and his devoted wife Vasuki, come from later traditions and devotional writing rather than from evidence of his own time.

His date is also debated. Traditional accounts place him in the centuries before the common era. Many modern scholars, studying the language and vocabulary of the text, place it between roughly the 3rd and 6th centuries CE, with the 5th century a frequent estimate. The Government of Tamil Nadu counts a "Thiruvalluvar year" that begins in 31 BCE, so 2026 is Thiruvalluvar year 2057.

What is clear from the work itself is the mind behind it: someone widely read, practical about money and power, sharp about human nature, tender about love, and unwilling to tie his teaching to any single religion, caste or kingdom. The Kural speaks of "the first Being" and of virtue, but it does not name a sectarian god, which is why people of many faiths have claimed it as their own. Tamil readers call it உலகப் பொதுமறை, Ulaga Pothumarai, "the common scripture of the world".

The book and its structure

The Thirukkural belongs to the Pathinenkilkanakku, the "Eighteen Minor Works" of classical Tamil literature, and is by far the best known of them. It is perfectly regular: 133 chapters (அதிகாரம், adhikaram), each with exactly 10 couplets, for 1,330 kurals in all. The chapters are grouped into three books (பால், paal), which follow the classical aims of life.

அறத்துப்பால் Aram, the Book of Virtue

38 chapters, kurals 1 to 380. Personal ethics: love, gratitude, truthfulness, patience, controlling anger, not envying, not killing, and accepting what fate brings.

பொருட்பால் Porul, the Book of Wealth

70 chapters, kurals 381 to 1080. Public life: leadership and justice, learning, choosing advisers and staff, timing, speech, friendship and enmity, money, farming and the dignity of work. This is the practical heart of the book and the part most people turn to for decisions.

காமத்துப்பால் Inbam, the Book of Love

25 chapters, kurals 1081 to 1330. Love before and after marriage, told as short dramatic scenes in the voices of the lover, the beloved and their friends, in the classical akam tradition of Tamil love poetry.

Within the books, the chapters are arranged in smaller sections (இயல், iyal), such as "Domestic Virtue", "Royalty" or "Friendship". You can see all of them in the chapter list on this page.

How a kural is built

Every couplet is written in the kural venba metre, the shortest form of the venba. The first line has four metrical feet and the second line has three, seven in all. The form is so strict that each kural feels like a finished proverb. Take the very first one:

Because the lines are so compressed, the same kural can be read in more than one way. That is why commentaries have always travelled with the text, and why this site shows a plain-language meaning beside the original rather than only a word-for-word translation.

Commentators and translators

Tradition counts ten medieval commentators on the Kural. Manakkudavar, from around the 10th century, wrote the earliest one that survives in full, and Parimelalhagar, in the 13th century, wrote the commentary that became the classic. In the 20th century, scholars and public figures such as Mu. Varadarasanar, Solomon Pappaiah and M. Karunanidhi wrote modern Tamil explanations that brought the text to new readers.

Translation began early. The Italian Jesuit Constantius Joseph Beschi rendered the first two books into Latin around 1730. Francis Whyte Ellis published English versions of some chapters in 1812. W. H. Drew and John Lazarus produced a prose English translation in the 19th century, and in 1886 G. U. Pope published the complete verse translation quoted on this site. Today the Kural has been translated into dozens of languages across Asia, Europe and beyond, which makes it one of the most widely translated non-religious works ever written.

The Kural in the world today

The Kural's teaching on non-violence reached far beyond Tamil Nadu. Leo Tolstoy quoted it in A Letter to a Hindu in 1908, a letter that the young Mohandas Gandhi read and translated, and Gandhi later spoke of the Kural with deep respect.

In Chennai, the Valluvar Kottam memorial, opened in 1976, has all 1,330 kurals carved in granite. At Kanyakumari, the southern tip of India, a statue of Thiruvalluvar unveiled on 1 January 2000 stands 133 feet tall, one foot for every chapter, on a 38-foot pedestal that stands for the 38 chapters on virtue. Thiruvalluvar Day is celebrated every January during the Pongal festival. Kurals are learned by heart in Tamil schools in India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and wherever the Tamil diaspora lives, and they are quoted in parliaments, courtrooms and family arguments alike.

How to use this site

• Read by chapter. Open any of the 133 chapters from the list on the right. On a phone, tap "Chapters" at the top.
• Four boxes for every kural. The palm-leaf strip shows the original Tamil. "How to say it" spells it in English letters. "Meaning in plain English" explains it, with Pope's verse translation one tap away. "Your language" follows the two menus above the cards.
• Choose your language box. "Say it in" spells the Tamil in Malay-style spelling, scholarly letters, or in Hindi, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada or Thai script. "Meaning in" shows the translation in your language. Your choice is remembered on this device.
• Listen in Tamil. Tap the Tamil text on any palm leaf, or the Listen button, to hear it read aloud. Your device needs a Tamil voice; if it has none, the site offers to play it on Google Translate instead.
• Share your thoughts. Open "Comments and feedback" under any kural to read what others have said. Sign in with Google to add a comment, suggest a better meaning or report a mistake. A manager may reply.
• Ask about your situation. Type what you are facing into the box at the top of every page, in English, Bahasa Melayu or Tamil. You will get the kurals that fit, and the chapters that deal with that theme.

Translation status

English and the Tamil commentary are complete. The Malay meaning is complete for all 1,330 kurals as a first draft and is waiting for review by native speakers. Other languages are listed so that translations can be added through the admin panel; until then, the "Your language" box offers to open the English meaning in Google Translate.

Version history

Sources and credits

• Tamil text, transliteration, English explanation and Tamil commentary: the open tk120404/thirukkural dataset, Apache License 2.0.
• Verse translation: G. U. Pope, The Sacred Kurral of Tiruvalluva-Nayanar, 1886, in the public domain.
• Malay meanings: draft translation prepared for this site, version V1.0. Corrections are welcome.
• Pronunciation in other scripts is generated letter by letter from the Tamil text. Tamil sounds that a script lacks are shown with the nearest letter.

• Portrait of Thiruvalluvar: an original illustration drawn for this site, version V1.1.

Thirukkural Online was created by Jayakanthan M. Lachmanan on 11 October 2026. Version V1.1.