Cilappatikaaram is a well known classic in Tamil written in the second century AD. It contains a mine of information about music and dance in ancient Tamil land. Several music scales, musical instruments and musical forms are described in this work. It has two commentaries which, though written several centuries after the original, are invaluable for not only do they explain the difficult passages but also augment their comments with copious quotations from ancient Tamil treatises on music and dance.
Because of the lapse of about 1800 years since it was written, the language, though Tamil, poses a problem for most of the terms pertaining to music and dance used in the classic are no longer in currency.
The aim of this thesis is to unravel, as far as it is possible, the meanings of these terms and find the identity of the ancient paN-s (musical notes), musical instruments like the yaazh, kuzhal and taNNumai and musical forms.