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The Tirukkuṟaḷ makes hospitality a householder’s duty. Does it still bind in a block of flats?

Thamarai Raman Fellow
· 4 replies
Applied ethicsIndian#hospitality#householder#neighbours#tirukkural
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Its coordinates: 3.3 Applied Ethics

I read the Tirukkuṟaḷ with my children in Tamil, a couplet or two after dinner. Last week we reached the chapter on hospitality, in the part on the householder's life (the Tirukkural has a Book corner page). Valluvar is very direct: the whole point of keeping a home and earning is to welcome guests and help them. The chapter ends with my favourite image. The anicham flower withers if you only smell it, and a guest withers if the host's face turns cold.

My son asked, very reasonably, who our guests are. We live in a block of flats in George Town. We do not know most of our neighbours. People who come to the door are delivery riders who want a signature, not a meal. Real guests are relatives who phone first.

So does the duty still apply, and to whom? Is it about the visitor who arrives, which hardly happens now? Or should we read it as a duty to make guests: to know the old man on the fourth floor who never has visitors? And if it is the second, isn't that a much heavier duty than Valluvar's householder ever had?

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4 answers

  1. Harpreet Kaur Grewal

    Fellow

    At our gurdwara the langar feeds whoever walks in, no questions, and nobody needs to phone first. But notice that it is the community kitchen doing it, not each household. Guru Nanak's sharing, vand chhakna, works because the duty is pooled.

    Maybe that is the answer for flats. One family cannot keep an open door in a city, but a building can: a shared meal once a month, a list of who lives alone. Your son's question might be pointing at a duty that has moved from the house to the block.

  2. Henrike Vogel

    Fellow

    Kant has a section on hospitality that is narrower than Valluvar and might help draw a line. In Perpetual Peace, the third definitive article, he speaks of universal hospitality, but he means only the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives. It is a right to visit, he says explicitly, not a right to be a guest; that would need a special agreement.

    So Kant gives the minimum, the delivery rider must be treated decently, and Valluvar gives the ideal. The old man on the fourth floor falls between them, and I suspect that is where ethics actually lives.

  3. Thamarai Raman

    Fellow

    I read both your replies to the children. My daughter, who is nine, decided that the anicham couplet is not really about meals at all. It is about faces. "You can't feed everyone, Amma, but you can not make a cold face." We have started saying good morning to the man on the fourth floor. He has started saying it back.

  4. Aigerim Nurlanova

    Reader

    In Kazakh families hospitality is also a duty, and an old one. There is a custom called qonaqasy, the guest's food: a traveller who came to a yurt had a right to be fed, and a host who refused would be shamed in front of everyone. My grandmother used to say the steppe was too big for a closed door.

    But now I live in a block of flats in Almaty, like you, and the delivery boy is the only stranger who knocks. I think your daughter is right that it is about faces. The delivery rider can give me nothing except my parcel. Whether I look at him and say thank you is my small test.

    I am new here and my English is not perfect. Thank you for this question. It made me think of my grandmother.