The Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has presented the Russian President Vladimir Putin with a Russian translation of the Thirukkural, during bilateral talks in New Delhi on Friday.
“Presented President Putin with a Russian translation of the Thirukkural, which carries the eternal wisdom of the great Thiruvalluvar across languages and borders,” Modi said in a post on X, accompanied by footage of the two leaders shaking hands as the book changed hands at Bharat Mandapam.
The edition, published by the Central Institute of Classical Tamil in Chennai as part of its Ancient Tamil Classics in Translation series, carries the original Tamil couplets alongside transliteration and a Russian rendering by the translator Naira Mkrtchyan, with an image of Thiruvalluvar on the cover.
Composed of 1,330 couplets arranged across 133 chapters and divided into sections on virtue, wealth and love, the Thirukkural is among the most celebrated works of classical Tamil literature. Dated by scholars to between roughly 300 BCE and 500 CE, it offers guidance on ethical conduct, governance, family life and human values.
Modi said the text would inspire readers in Russia and help strengthen people-to-people ties between the two countries.
Talks ahead of the summit
The meeting came on the eve of the 18th BRICS summit, which India is hosting at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi on 12 and 13 September. India assumed the bloc’s chairship on 1 January, its fourth, under the theme “Building for Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability”, and has held more than 350 related meetings across over 25 cities during the year. The summit marks two decades since the grouping was established.
Founded by Brazil, Russia, India and China, and joined by South Africa in 2011, BRICS expanded in 2024 to admit Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, with Indonesia joining in 2025, bringing the membership to eleven. The bloc positions itself as a counterweight to Western-dominated institutions and has pursued reforms to global governance and alternatives to the dollar-based financial system. The Chinese President Xi Jinping, the South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian, Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Indonesia’s Prabowo Subianto are among those attending.
Modi and Putin were expected to discuss defence, energy, critical minerals and trade, with the two sides working towards a target of 100 billion US dollars in annual bilateral trade by 2030. India’s continued purchases of discounted Russian oil since the invasion of Ukraine have drawn criticism from Western governments, and New Delhi has declined to condemn the invasion outright.
Modi presented Putin with a Russian-language copy of the Bhagavad Gita during the Russian president’s previous visit to Delhi in December.
Tamil heritage as diplomacy
The gift continues a practice the Indian prime minister has made a feature of his public life. He quoted the Sangam-era poet Kaniyan Poongundranar in his address to the UN General Assembly in 2019, invoked Tamil culture during a state visit to Malaysia in February, and has promoted the Kashi Tamil Sangamam as a cultural bridge between Tamil Nadu and his Varanasi constituency, launching multilingual and braille translations of the Thirukkural and the Manimekalai at the 2023 edition.
In 2020 he praised the Thirukkural as “extremely inspiring”. As the Tamil Guardian noted at the time, that praise came as chapters on Periyar, the Chola king Rajaraja Cholan and the Sangam epic Silappathikaram were removed from Central Board of Secondary Education textbooks, and as Eelam Tamil refugees who had lived in India for decades were excluded from the offer of citizenship under the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019.