The Study of Stolen Love

This is the first complete English translation of an important work of Tamil poetics. The Study of Stolen Love , composed in southern India in or about the eighth century CE, is a commentary structured around 60 terse verses of uncertain origin on the poetry of love. The commentary also includes hundreds of illustrative poems drawn from various Tamil literary periods ranging from the very earliest through the eighth century. The earliest extant book-length Tamil prose composition, it explicated existing poetic conventions and ushered in a new era of its own. This remarkable text not only exemplified but also explicitly outlined classical Tamil interpretive method for the first time; even today, its method still structures all formal Tamil commentary on all subjects: religious, non-religious, and that vast realm in which the two are interlaced.