The husband planning to kill her

At a Glance

• Central figures: Kundalakesi, a merchant’s daughter of Puhar who becomes a Jain ascetic and later a Buddhist nun; and her husband, a thief condemned to death whom she saves through her father’s wealth and influence.
• Setting: The Chola port city of Puhar (Kaveripoompattinam), in the world of the five great Tamil epics; Kundalakesi is one of the aimperumkappiyangal, composed by Nathakuthanaar, surviving now only in fragments and later summaries.
• The turn: The thief-husband, having married Kundalakesi, leads her to a clifftop intending to murder her for her jewels.
• The outcome: Kundalakesi outwits him and pushes him from the cliff instead, then renounces the world entirely.
• The legacy: The story survives in fragments and in the Buddhist hagiographic tradition; Kundalakesi became one of the great exemplars of women who entered the Buddhist sangha in Tamil literary memory, though the full epic is lost.

She saw him first from the upper window of her father’s house - the thief, bound at the wrists, being led through the streets of Puhar toward his execution. He was young. His face was calm in a way that made no sense for a man walking to his death, and Kundalakesi could not stop looking at it.

Her father was a merchant of great standing in the city, wealthy enough to furnish ships that sailed to the yavana ports and back. Kundalakesi wanted for nothing. She had gold at her throat, jasmine knotted through her hair every morning by her attendants, and she had never spoken to a man outside her household. But she watched the thief pass below, and something shifted in her that would not shift back.

The Merchant’s Daughter and the Condemned Man

She would not eat. She would not speak to her father or her attendants. She lay on the cool floor of her room and would not rise, and when her father came to her - alarmed, because she was his only child and he loved her without limit - she told him plainly: she wanted the thief. She wanted him released and she wanted to marry him.

Her father was horrified. A thief. A man already sentenced. A man whose caste and family were unknown, whose hands had taken what was not his, who would be dead by the week’s end. He argued. He brought other proposals - sons of merchants, sons of minor kings. Kundalakesi refused them all. She lay on the floor and grew thin, and her father, who could not bear to watch her die of this, went to the authorities with his money and his influence and bought the thief’s life.

The thief was released. He was washed and dressed in fine cloth. He was given Kundalakesi as his wife, and she was given to him, and for a time she was happy. She adorned him with her father’s gold. She fed him from her father’s table. She gave him everything she had, which was considerable, and he took it with the same calm face she had first seen from the window.

The Walk to the Cliff

He asked her one morning to come with him to the hilltop outside the city. There was a temple there, he said. He wanted to make an offering, and he wanted her beside him. She dressed in her best silk and put on every piece of jewelry she owned - the kundalas at her ears that gave her the name Kundalakesi, the gold at her wrists, the chains at her throat. She walked with him out of Puhar and up the hill path.

The path grew steep. The temple was not where he said it would be. They climbed higher and the trees thinned and the wind picked up, and when they reached the top there was nothing - no temple, no shrine, only the cliff edge and the rocks far below and the sound of the sea.

He turned to her.

Give me your jewels.

She looked at him. He was not asking. His hands were loose at his sides but his weight had shifted, and she understood what he meant to do. He would take her ornaments and throw her from the cliff, and no one in Puhar would know what had happened. He would walk back down with her gold and disappear, and her father would spend years searching for a daughter whose bones lay broken at the base of a hill.

Kundalakesi’s Answer

She did not scream. She did not beg. What she did was think, and she thought quickly, because the cliff edge was very close and his body was between her and the path back down.

She said she would give him everything. She asked only to walk around him once, in the manner of a wife taking leave of her husband - the pradakshina, the circumambulation of respect. Let me honor you once before I die, she said. Or perhaps she said it differently. The fragments do not preserve her exact words, only what happened next.

He let her walk around him. He was a thief, not a soldier, and perhaps he was moved by the gesture, or perhaps he simply did not think a merchant’s daughter was capable of what she was about to do. She circled behind him. She placed both hands flat against his back. She pushed.

He fell. The rocks received him. The sound of the sea continued.

The Renunciation

Kundalakesi stood at the cliff’s edge with her jewelry still on her body and her husband’s blood on the stones below, and something in her broke open - not grief, not guilt, but a clarity so total it felt like burning. She had been a girl who watched from a window. She had been a wife who adorned a thief. She had been a woman who killed a man to save her own life. None of these were enough.

She stripped the gold from her ears and her wrists and her throat. She left it in a pile on the hilltop. She walked down barefoot and did not return to her father’s house.

The accounts diverge here, as fragments do. In one telling she encountered Jain monks first and studied with them, debating doctrine, winning arguments, wandering the roads of the Tamil country as an ascetic with a shaved head and nothing to her name. In another she went directly to the Buddhist sangha. What the surviving verses agree on is that she became a formidable debater - a woman who could defeat scholars in public contest - and that she eventually met the teachings of the Buddha and found in them what she had been looking for since the morning she watched a man walk calmly toward his death.

What Remains

The full text of Kundalakesi is gone. Nathakuthanaar’s verses survive only in scraps - quoted in commentaries, referenced in later works, fragments preserved because a grammarian needed an example of a particular poetic form. What we have is the skeleton: a woman’s desire, a thief’s betrayal, a push from a cliff, and a renunciation so complete it carried her out of her life and into a tradition.

The five great Tamil epics are called the aimperumkappiyangal. Two survive whole - Cilappatikaram and Manimekalai. Three are largely lost. Kundalakesi is among the lost, and what remains of her is this: a merchant’s daughter who loved unwisely, killed necessarily, and then walked away from every comfort her world could offer. The hill outside Puhar still drops to the sea. The text is gone but the story held.