The Thirukkural, the Gala Dinner, and What Vladimir Putin Did Not Know He Was Eating
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi sat down with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the bilateral meeting ahead of the BRICS Summit and handed him a gift. It was a very thoughtful Russian-language translation of the Thirukkural, the 1,330 couplet Tamil classical text attributed to one of our greatest philosophers Thiruvalluvar, composed somewhere between the 4th century BCE and the 6th century CE, translated into more than 107 languages, claimed by Jains, Hindus, and Christians alike.
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| Image Source: MEA India |
Presented President Putin with a Russian translation of the Thirukkural, which carries the eternal wisdom of the great Thiruvalluvar across languages and borders. pic.twitter.com/rvk3rRDnvg
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) September 11, 2026
I have spent considerable time with Perumal Murugan, the outstanding Tamil novelist, whose life I serialised in ten parts for South First. When Murugan had enrolled in college in Erode and committed to memorising the entire Thirukkural, Chapter 26 stopped him.
Chapter 26 of the Thirukkural is called "Pulaal Marutthal", which loosely translates to "Abstinence from Meat". It runs ten couplets and does not build to its argument gradually. It opens at full force and intensifies. The first kural asks: "How can one command grace who eats the flesh of others to swell his own flesh?" The second declares that as there is no scope for wealth with a spendthrift, so there is no compassion with a meat eater. The third says there is no mercy in the hearts of those armed to kill and those who feast on flesh, placing the diner and the killer in the same moral category. The fourth calls killing a disgrace and eating the meat of what is killed senseless. The fifth warns that those who do not abstain from meat to save life will find the clenched jaws of hell holding them. The sixth makes the economic argument that the world cannot claim innocence by saying it eats but does not kill because no one will sell if there is none to buy. The seventh asks the reader to abstain from eating flesh by realising it as the wound of another. The eighth says that those visionaries freed of ignorance will not feed on flesh separated from its life. The ninth states that it is better than a thousand burnt offerings to leave one life un-killed and un-eaten. The tenth closes the chapter with the promise that all living things will fold their hands and bow to one who refuses to kill or eat meat. Ten couplets. No ambiguity. No exceptions offered.
Do you know what impact these couplets had on Murugan? It led him to give up meat entirely for five long years. His grandmother, who came from a family where meat was not merely food but ceremony, would become emotional at gatherings when Murugan quietly declined. He eventually returned to eating meat — he concluded it was acceptable, his beliefs shifted — but the five years happened and they happened because ten couplets in a language that is two thousand years old had the specific gravity to change a young man's daily life.
This is the text Modi placed in Putin's hands. In Russian.
Whether the conjunction between the gift and the dinner was deliberate is a question only the Prime Minister's office can answer but the conjunction exists and it is not small. Putin leads a country whose cuisine and culture are built around fish and meat. Xi comes from a civilisation whose imperial banquets have for centuries included Peking duck and braised pork. Pezeshkian comes from Iran, where lamb is the language of hospitality. The UAE Crown Prince comes from a tradition where roast whole lamb is the gesture of the highest honour. All of them were to receive Gucchi Marmik and Shahtoot Phirni.
India served them the argument in the book and the argument on the plate simultaneously.
Here's the BRICS dinner menu with a photo next to each item. pic.twitter.com/iRLJbcCCMV
— Grok (@grok) September 12, 2026
The government's own data — the National Family Health Survey 5, conducted from 2019 to 2021 — shows that 70.6 percent of Indian women and 83.4 percent of Indian men consume non-vegetarian food. The country whose Prime Minister gifted the world's most prominent carnivore a text arguing that meat-eaters cannot command grace, and then served that man a dinner without meat, is a country where more than seven in ten people eat meat regularly.
For the record: 80% of Indians are non-vegetarian.
— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) September 13, 2026
Indian non-vegetarian food is delicious. As are my sister's chole bhature. pic.twitter.com/8f6ziKjLan
The Thirukkural transcends every boundary it has been placed within whether that is religious, national or even civilisational. Thiruvalluvar has been claimed and reclaimed across two millennia precisely because nobody owns him. Chapter 26 does not belong to any political agenda. Its argument is older and more patient than this summit.
But it sat in Putin's hands. And the table had no meat. And both of those things happened on the same night in New Delhi and this story of the BRICS Summit would be told for a long time without either of them being mentioned in the same breath. So, I thought this leaf from my chronicles would interest the readers while the national media, true to its reputation, is busy counting "the lovely swag" of the items contained in the media kit that they received.
(Saket Suman is Editor at IndianRepublic.in, and the author of The Psychology of a Patriot.)