Civakan and his many marriages
At a Glance
- Central figures: Civakan (also called Jivaka), a prince raised in hiding, who becomes warrior, lover, and king before renouncing everything; and the eight women he marries across the arc of his life.
- Setting: The Jain literary world of Civaka Cintamani, composed by the Jain monk Tiruttakkatevar, one of the aimperumkappiyangal (five great Tamil epics); set in a mythic landscape of Tamil kingdoms, merchant cities, and forest retreats.
- The turn: Civakan, dispossessed at birth and raised by a merchant woman, discovers his royal blood and sets out to reclaim his throne - but at every turn, a new marriage entangles him deeper in the world of pleasure and power.
- The outcome: After eight marriages, Civakan sees the emptiness behind every joy he has accumulated and takes Jain renunciation, leaving wives, kingdom, and name behind.
- The legacy: Civaka Cintamani became one of the foundational texts of Tamil literary tradition, its verse form (viruttam) influencing the great Vaishnavite poet Kamban, and it remains the most elaborate Tamil treatment of worldly attachment as the precondition for genuine renunciation.
The boy’s mother died running. She had carried him out of the palace the night his father was murdered, fled through the streets of the capital with soldiers behind her, and collapsed at the edge of the city. A merchant woman named Vimatiyar found the infant beside the body. She took him home, named him Civakan, and raised him as her own.
He grew up among bolts of silk and ledger-books, not knowing what he was. But the body knows what the mind does not. By the time he was a young man, Civakan could ride anything, fight anyone, charm any room he entered. Vimatiyar watched him and said nothing about the dead queen or the usurped throne. Not yet.
The Merchant’s House and the First Bride
Civakan’s first wife was Caccantai, and the marriage happened the way most things happened in his early life - through sheer excellence that nobody could ignore. He won a contest. The details mattered in the telling: the physical trials, the display of skill with weapons and horses, the way the other suitors fell away. Caccantai chose him. She had wealth. He had nothing but his body and his nerve.
But Civakan was not built for one house. Tiruttakkatevar, the poet-monk who composed this epic, understood something about desire: it does not deepen. It widens. Civakan did not tire of Caccantai. He simply noticed another woman. And then another.
His second wife was Patumam, a woman of extraordinary beauty whom he encountered while traveling. His third was Kemalai. His fourth, Kanakamaalai. Each marriage had its own episode, its own obstacles - a rival suitor to defeat, a father to persuade, a test to pass. Tiruttakkatevar gave each bride her own canto, her own world. The epic does not blur them together. It insists on the particularity of each attachment.
Eight Wives and the Weight of Accumulation
By the time Civakan married his fifth wife, Vintaiyar, and then his sixth, Cumataiyar, the pattern was unmistakable to everyone except Civakan himself. He was collecting lives. Each marriage brought new allies, new estates, new children. He became powerful almost by accident - a prince without a throne accumulating the substance of a kingdom through love and war in equal measure.
His seventh wife was Kanavalai. His eighth was Vimalavati.
Tiruttakkatevar gives each of these women her own scenes, her own voice. They are not interchangeable. Some are merchants’ daughters, some are of royal blood, some are won through battle and some through persuasion. The epic spends hundreds of stanzas on the arts of courtship - how Civakan dressed, what he said, the jewels he gave, the music that was played. The poet-monk was a Jain ascetic, but he wrote desire with the precision of a man who had studied it the way a physician studies illness: thoroughly, without flinching, because you cannot cure what you have not understood.
The viruttam verse form Tiruttakkatevar chose - four-line stanzas with a particular rhythmic weight - gave the Tamil language a new music. Kamban would later use the same form for his Ramavataram. The tool built for describing Civakan’s bedroom scenes became the vehicle for Rama’s exile. Tamil literary history turns on this borrowed meter.
Vimatiyar’s Secret
Between the marriages, the real plot surfaced. Vimatiyar eventually told Civakan the truth: his father had been a king, murdered by a treacherous minister. The throne was his by right. The merchant woman had kept the secret until she judged him ready - ready meaning powerful enough, connected enough through his web of marriages and alliances, to take back what was stolen.
Civakan went to war. He reclaimed the kingdom. The usurper fell. The boy raised among silk merchants sat on his father’s throne, and for a time the accumulation seemed justified - every wife, every alliance, every contest won had been building toward this restoration.
He had everything now. Eight wives. A kingdom. Wealth. Children. The gratitude of a people restored to their rightful king.
The Renunciation
Then Civakan walked away from all of it.
Tiruttakkatevar does not frame this as sudden. The Jain teaching had been present throughout the epic - monks appearing at the margins, ascetics passing through, the doctrine of karma and attachment woven into the background like a thread in silk that you only notice when the light changes. Civakan had heard it all before. He had nodded and gone back to his wives.
But something turned. The epic does not psychologize it into a single dramatic moment. Instead there is a gradual seeing - pleasure after pleasure, wife after wife, victory after victory, and the slow recognition that none of it held. Not because it was false, but because it was impermanent. The silk wears thin. The body ages. The throne will pass to someone else.
Civakan took Jain diksha - initiation into the ascetic life. He shaved his head. He gave up the kingdom, the wives, the horses, the jewels, the name. In Jain terms, this was not abandonment. It was the only logical conclusion of a life lived fully enough to see that fullness was not the answer.
His wives - some of them - followed him into renunciation. Others did not. Tiruttakkatevar does not judge either choice. The epic ends in stillness after nine thousand stanzas of motion.
What the Poet-Monk Built
Civaka Cintamani survives complete - all thirteen cantos, all the marriages, the wars, the renunciation. It is the only one of the five great Tamil epics composed by a Jain author. It was controversial in its own time; later Tamil commentators sometimes bristled at its frank eroticism, arguing that a monk had no business writing bedroom scenes with such evident skill.
But Tiruttakkatevar knew exactly what he was doing. You cannot show the liberation from desire without first showing desire itself, in its fullness, its variety, its specific and irreplaceable textures. Civakan needed eight wives so that when he left them, the reader would know what was being left. Not an abstraction. Not “worldly attachment.” Eight particular women, eight particular lives, eight particular rooms in a house that a man built and then walked out of, barefoot, into the open air.