PERCIVAL, Peter. Tamil Proverbs with their English Translation. Containing upwards of Six Thousand Proverbs … Second Edition. Madras: printed and published at the Divanartamani Press, Little Bourne, Mylapore. 1874.
8vo. 20th-century half buckram over marbled boards, top edge gilt; pp. xi, 573, apart from light toning to paper, a very clean copy of a great rarity.
Published first in Jaffna in 1843 and containing just a fraction of the amount of proverbs presented here, this is the substantially enlarged bilingual Tamil proverb collection, probably the biggest ever published, containing 6156 entries in both Tamil and English. The missionary Peter Percival had arrived in India in 1826, after having studied the languages in England. He encountered another clergyman in Bengal interested in proverbs. He then worked - and collected - among the Tamil people and published the first edition containing just under 1900 proverbs. With other Europeans he published the periodical Dinavartamani 'for the purpose of diffusing, among the Tamil people, information social, political and literary' (p. vi). When Percival set out to publish a new edition of the proverb collection he encountered the Reverend G. Fryar of Manargudi, Tanjore District, who had been collecting proverbs for nine years. The two collections were merged and the result is this second edition, which could have been larger, had Percival not decided to leave out the proverbs 'generally taught in schools, and indeed regarded as part of a school cause' (p. ix), which illustrates the importance of proverbs in Tamil culture.
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