A section from the journey

The Goddess and Kannagi

The Tamils told of Kannagi, a faithful wife whose innocent husband was wrongly killed by a king. In her grief and rage she became a figure of terrible power. A Chera king, Senguttuvan, set up her worship as a goddess of wifely faith. Her story is told in a later Tamil epic, the Silappatikaram, written around the fifth or sixth century after Christ, after the Sangam age proper.

We have met gods of the hills, the pastures, and the wasteland. Now let us meet a goddess of a different kind, one who began her story as a woman, walking the earth. Her name is , and the Tamils have loved her tale for ages.

She was a faithful wife. Her husband was named Kovalan. Through a terrible mistake, he was wrongly accused of stealing, judged a thief, and put to death by the king of the great city of Madurai. He was innocent, but the wrong was done.

Then Kannagi came before the king. Blazing with grief, she proved her husband's innocence beyond all doubt. And the power in her, the power of her wronged faithfulness, was so great that it brought fire and ruin upon the whole city. Her sorrow was not weak. It shook a kingdom.

The Tamils felt something holy and fearsome in this. They had a word for it: , a dangerous sacred power that dwells in things and in people, and which they felt most strongly in the faithfulness of a wife. In Kannagi, that power had blazed out for all to see.

And so a wonderful thing happened. A woman was raised up to a goddess. She came to be worshipped as , the goddess of the faithful wife. A mortal woman, through the sheer power of her devotion and her grief, had become divine in the eyes of her people.

A great king of the Chera line, , took up her worship and gave it a home. Around the second century after Christ, he founded her cult, and it spread far: across the Tamil land, and over the sea to the island of Lanka. This is early temple culture taking root in the south, a god given a settled, public place to be honoured.

Now a word of care, the kind an honest teacher must give. The full story of Kannagi is told in a famous Tamil epic called the . It is a treasure. But it was written later than the Sangam poems, around the fifth or sixth century after Christ. So we lean on it gently, to look back at this older devotion, without pretending the book itself is as old as the poems we have been reading.

Step back now and see what the Tamil south has shown us. The Goddess, here, wears many faces. She is Korravai, fierce in the wasteland. And she is Kannagi, the faithful wife raised to heaven. The great divine Mother, who will fill so much of our later story, is already deeply at home in the Tamil land, worshipped, sung, and now given temples of her own.

Kannagi's people honoured her grief as something powerful and holy, not something to be hushed away. When you have seen someone carry a great sorrow with dignity, what did it stir in you?