குண்டலகேசி

The deepest loss in the Tamil literary canon. Kuṇṭalakēci is the most fragmentary of the Five Great Epics — fewer verses survive here than in any other work in this library. What remains was not preserved by someone who cared about this poem; it was preserved by grammarians who needed examples of specific metres and constructions. The epic itself — its story, its characters, its plot — must be reconstructed almost entirely from Pali Buddhist sources written centuries later. What survives in Tamil is nineteen windows into a building whose walls are gone.