Traditional account According to traditional and legendary accounts, after writing the Kural text, Tiruvalluvar left for
Madurai on the advice of his friends to "triumph over the college of the doctors" at the
Madurai College. On the way to
Madurai, at Idaykarlyi, he met
Avvaiyar and
Idaikkadar and revealed the purpose of his journey and they joined him, too, in his journey to the College of Madurai. Upon reaching the Madurai College, Tiruvalluvar submitted his text, calling it
Muppāl, before
Somasundara, in the hearing of the
Pandyan king and his ministers, chiefs, and scholars. This alarmed the assembly of professors. Legend has it that forty-nine professors "sat as kings of the sweet tongue" on the bench of poets, known as
Sanga palagai, by the
tank covered with the golden lotus at the
Madurai temple. The scholars there were adept at finding errors in the most skillful compositions. This is well known by the account of
Nakkirar II, one of the later scholar of the Madurai College lineage who even dared to say to
Shiva, "Though you show us your frontal eye, a fault is a fault", on his appearing to favor an amateur poet named Dharumi. The assembly of scholars said to have doubted Tiruvalluvar's erudition and said to him that the bench on which they sat will make room for the best treatise in
high Tamil, which shall be taken as a sign of acceptance of his work. When Tiruvalluvar laid his book thereupon, the seat immediately contracted itself to the size of the work throwing all the professors into the lotus pond. Scrambling out of the water, the forty-nine scholars pronounced a stanza each in praise of Tiruvalluvar and his work. Idaikkadar and Avvaiyar, who accompanied Tiruvalluvar in the journey, broke their silence and gave their opinion in the form of poetry. With four more verses adding to the corpus, including that by divine elements such as the voices of the Oracle, Namagal (
Saraswati), and Iraiyanar (Shiva), the collection came to be known as the Tiruvalluva Malai or "the garland to Tiruvalluvar".
Historical account As with the date of the Tirukkural and its author itself, the exact date of the composition of the verses of the Tiruvalluva Malai remains unclear. All the contributors of the Tiruvalluva Malai pre-date the period of the earliest commentators of the Kural text such as
Manakkudavar. Historically, the time of the contributors spans several centuries starting from around 1st century CE. According to
S. N. Kandasamy, the work must have been composed no later than 7th and 8th centuries CE. The verses must have been compiled into its present form by around 10th century CE.
David Shulman attributes it to the
Chola period. ==Content==