Kovalan's love for Madhavi

At a Glance

• Central figures: Kovalan, a wealthy merchant’s son of Puhar; Madhavi, a celebrated courtesan and dancer of the same city; Kannagi, Kovalan’s wife, who waits at home.
• Setting: The Chola port city of Puhar (Kaveripoompattinam) on the Bay of Bengal coast, as told in the first book of the Cilappatikaram of Ilango Adigal.
• The turn: Kovalan, already married to Kannagi, sees Madhavi dance at the Indra festival and enters a liaison with her that consumes his wealth, his attention, and his place in his own household.
• The outcome: Kovalan squanders his fortune on Madhavi, and when jealousy and misunderstanding finally break the liaison apart, he returns to Kannagi stripped of everything but guilt - and one of her anklets.
• The legacy: Kovalan’s abandonment of Kannagi sets in motion the catastrophe at Madurai - the false accusation, the execution, and Kannagi’s burning of the city - that makes her the goddess Pattini.

The Indra festival had filled Puhar for fourteen days. Garlands of white jasmine hung from the balconies on the merchant streets, and the smell of sandalwood paste thickened in the evening heat. Dancers performed in the open courts near the harbor. Ships from the yavana ports rode at anchor in the Cauvery’s mouth, and their crews drank palm wine along the shore with Chola sailors and watched the processions go past - elephants painted in turmeric, drummers striking the thappu, temple women carrying oil lamps balanced on their heads.

Kovalan had a wife. Her name was Kannagi, daughter of a ship-merchant of Puhar, and she was waiting for him in the house his father had given them when they married. She had dressed her hair with jasmine. She had set out food. The house was lit. Kovalan was not there.

Madhavi at the Indra Festival

She danced the eleven poses. That was the tradition for a nagara vilakkam - the ceremonial dancer who opened the festival before the Chola king. Madhavi had trained since she was five. Her mother, Chitrapati, had been a dancer before her, and her mother before that - the line went back to the founding of the guild. A courtesan in Puhar was not a woman of the street. She was an artist whose price was set by the court, whose debut was a public event, whose garland was auctioned to the highest bidder.

Kovalan bid for the garland. He won it. The price was one thousand and eight gold coins.

He placed the garland around her neck that night in the hall where the dancers rested, and she looked at him with dark eyes rimmed in mai and said nothing. She did not need to say anything. The transaction was already complete. From that night, Kovalan belonged to Madhavi’s house, and Kannagi’s house went dark.

The House on the Street of Dancers

Madhavi lived in a house with a courtyard where a neem tree grew, on the street where the other courtesans of Puhar kept their establishments. Kovalan moved in. He did not move his things - he simply stopped going home. Days became weeks. Weeks stretched. Kannagi sent no message. She waited, as a woman of karpu waited, which meant she waited without complaint and without condition, and she kept the house as if he might walk through the door at any hour.

Kovalan spent. He spent on Madhavi’s clothes, her jewels, her musicians, the upkeep of her household. He spent on the feasts he hosted in her courtyard. He spent on the poets who composed songs for her and on the goldsmiths who made her earrings. His father’s wealth was not infinite, but Kovalan acted as if it were, and for a while the illusion held.

Madhavi was not unkind. She sang for him in the evenings - songs from the akam tradition, love poems set in the five landscapes, and her voice was the kind of voice that could make a man believe the song was about him alone. When she sang of the mountain country, the kurinji land of secret union, her hand rested on his knee and the neem leaves threw shadows on the wall. He believed her. He believed every word, every touch, every glance. He had never learned to read the difference between art and affection, and Madhavi was very good at her art.

The Song That Broke It

It happened at a small gathering, another evening in the courtyard. Madhavi sang a kuravanji - a fortune-telling song in which the singer takes the voice of a woman asking a gypsy woman about her lover’s fidelity. The song was a convention. Every courtesan sang it. The words were traditional.

Kovalan heard them as accusation.

The verse described a lover who strayed, who gave his heart to another woman, who could not be trusted to return. Kovalan’s face changed. He set down his cup of kallu. He looked at Madhavi and saw - or thought he saw - mockery. She was singing about him. She was telling the room he was faithless.

He stood up and left. No argument, no scene. He simply walked out of the courtyard, through the gate, into the dark street, and he did not come back.

Whether Madhavi intended the song as a barb - or whether she was simply singing a song she had always sung, and Kovalan’s guilt heard what guilt always hears - the Cilappatikaram does not resolve. Ilango Adigal lets both readings stand. The ambiguity is the point.

What Kovalan Carried Home

He went back to Kannagi. He walked through the door of the house he had abandoned for months. She was there. She had not left. She had not taken off her marriage ornaments. She had kept oil in the lamps.

He had nothing to give her except himself, and even that was diminished. His wealth was gone - spent in Madhavi’s courtyard, poured into the coffers of musicians and goldsmiths and wine-sellers. His father’s credit was exhausted. His reputation in Puhar was the reputation of a man who had lost his mind over a dancing girl, and now the dancing girl had thrown him out, or he had thrown himself out, and neither version made him look wise.

Kannagi did not reproach him. She took off her anklets - two gold anklets filled with rubies - and gave them to him.

“Sell these,” she said. “We can begin again.”

It was all she had left of value, and she gave both without hesitation. Kovalan took one. He could not take both. Even his shame had limits, or perhaps especially his shame - the man who had wasted a fortune could not bring himself to take every last thing from the wife he had wronged.

They left Puhar together, walking south toward Madurai, carrying one anklet between them. The other stayed behind with Kannagi, though what mattered now was the one Kovalan held, the one he intended to sell in a city where no one knew him.

The Road South

The road from Puhar to Madurai crossed the marutham country, the fertile river-land of the Kaveri delta, and then turned into harder ground - dry fields, palmyra palms, the red dust of the south. They walked. A Jain monk and a Buddhist nun, met separately along the way, gave them shelter and counsel. Kannagi’s feet bled. She did not complain.

Behind them, in Puhar, Madhavi discovered she was carrying Kovalan’s child. She would bear a daughter, Manimekalai, and raise her in the courtesan’s house on the street of dancers, and that daughter would one day renounce everything her mother’s world stood for. But that is another story, told in another epic.

Ahead of them, in Madurai, a goldsmith had stolen the Pandya queen’s anklet. He was looking for someone to blame. And Kovalan was walking toward him with a matching anklet in his hand.