The Implied Imperative: Poetry as Ethics in the Proverbs of the Tirukkuṟaḷ

Abstract

The Tirukkuṟaḷ is a text of Tamil proverbs that circulates widely in South India today. While the first two sections of the text contain practical pieces of ethical advice, the third section contains an extended love poem. This variation in content has resulted in a dichotomous view of the text in which ethics and poetry are viewed as fundamentally distinct. This paper blurs the distinction between ethics and poetry by showing how the poetic form of the Tirukkuṟaḷ's proverbs not only enhances the text's ethical message but also participates in the ethical formation of the text's audience. Building on Geoffrey Galt Harpham's notion of sub-ethics, I argue that the Tirukkuṟaḷ uses three literary strategies—metaphor, inference, and suspense—to engage the audience in modes of “sub-ethical” reflection by raising ethical questions and framing ethical choices.