Farming

On cultivation as the work everything else rests on, and on the independence of those who live by it.

This chapter praises one kind of work and, doing so, walks close to two things it never actually says. It never ranks people, and it never says the plough is the only honourable trade. 1032 is the clearest: the ploughers hold up everyone who takes up work they cannot do — `அஃது ஆற்றாது எழுவாரை எல்லாம் பொறுத்து` — and Parimelazhagar glosses the inability as `செய்யமாட்டாது`, unable, not unwilling and not ignorant. What the chapter states is what the cultivators carry, never what anyone else lacks.

The English printed beside these lines does not always keep that. Aiyar has `Husbandmen` at 1032, `men must at last stand behind the plough` at 1031, `the men that eat the bread of husbandry` at 1035 and `the husbandman sitteth still` at 1036 — four places where a sex enters that the Tamil has not got, since `-ஆர்` and `-அர்` are common to both genders and Parimelazhagar's `உடையார்` keeps them so. Pope is faithful on this through almost the whole chapter; his one import is at 1040, `Men seated idle pleading poverty`, where the Tamil `இருப்பாரை` is an ungendered participial plural. At 1039 his `master` and `wife` are not imports at all: `கிழவன்` is masculine in the line itself and `இல்லாள்` is Valluvar's own word. Each of those is named on the word card where it occurs, rather than quietly corrected.

Two verses need saying plainly. 1037 gives a test rather than an exhortation — earth dried until a measure of its dust falls to a quarter needs no manure — and that fourfold fall is the reading Parimelazhagar, Pope and Aiyar all share; what none of them supplies is a reason for it, and neither does this page. And 1040 is not addressed to anybody who genuinely has nothing. Its subject is a person with the means standing untouched beside them, and the chapter that follows, நல்குரவு, is where want itself is spoken about.

The order matters. 1038 ranks manure above ploughing and guarding above water, with weeding already done — Parimelazhagar's `களைகட்டால்` is a completed precondition, not a term in the ranking. 1039 turns the same attention into a warning about the owner who stops coming. Read together they say that the large obvious work is not where a crop is won or lost.

AI draft · pending review