The land dispute

At a Glance

• Central figures: Ponnar and Sankar, the twin heroes of the Annanmar legend, sons of Periyathambi and Thamarai; their father’s elder half-brothers who conspire to deny the twins their birthright.
• Setting: The Kongu Nadu countryside of western Tamil Nadu, in the fertile farmlands between the Cauvery and the Noyyal rivers, from the oral Annanmar Swamy tradition performed in koothu and villupattu (bow-song) by village bards.
• The turn: Periyathambi’s elder half-brothers refuse to divide the ancestral land, claiming the younger brother and his sons have no share, and they bring false witnesses before the village elders.
• The outcome: The dispute is settled through a plowing contest ordained by the village assembly; Ponnar and Sankar yoke their bulls and plow a field that no one believed could be broken, forcing the elders to grant them their father’s portion.
• The legacy: The plowed field and the boundary stones the twins set became sacred markers in the Annanmar tradition, commemorated in the multi-day koothu performances where this episode is enacted before the harvest season.

The bulls would not move for anyone else. They stood in the dirt with their heavy heads lowered, and the elder brothers’ men pulled at the ropes and struck the animals across the flanks, and still they did not move. They had been Periyathambi’s bulls. Now Periyathambi was dead and the bulls stood where they stood and would not be led.

Ponnar, the elder twin, watched this from the edge of the field with his arms folded. Sankar, the younger, squatted beside him chewing a neem stick. Neither spoke. They had buried their father three weeks ago. The land was supposed to come to them. It had not.

The Uncles at the Thinnai

Periyathambi had seven elder half-brothers, sons of his father’s first wife. They were established men with thick holdings and brick houses and daughters married into good families. Periyathambi had been the son of the second wife - Thamarai, who had prayed at every kovil between Erode and Dharapuram before the god finally granted her children. The half-brothers had tolerated Periyathambi while he lived. He was mild, he farmed his portion without complaint, he did not press for more.

But Ponnar and Sankar were not mild. They were tall, broad across the chest, quick-tempered. The village knew them by their walk. And the half-brothers understood, sitting together on the eldest’s thinnai one evening after the funeral rites, that if the twins received their father’s land, the twins would not stay quiet on it. They would expand. They would claim what was owed. They would count every furrow.

So the eldest half-brother, whose name the villupattu singers give as Chinnasamy, summoned the nattamai - the village headman - and said there was no division to make. Periyathambi, he said, had been given a share in life as a kindness, not a right. The land belonged to the elder line. The second wife’s son had no legal portion. He brought two old men to say this was so. The old men said it was so.

Thamarai’s Words

Thamarai did not go to the village assembly. She sat in her house with the door open and the smoke from the cooking fire drifting out. When Ponnar came to tell her what Chinnasamy had said, she listened without moving.

Then she said: your father cleared that land with his own hands. He pulled the stones out of the red earth before you were born. The palmyra stumps he dug out are still piled at the field’s edge. Go count them. Sixty-three stumps. That is not a gift. That is labor. That is land earned.

She told him one more thing. The bulls know the field. The bulls will answer for your father.

Ponnar did not fully understand this. But Sankar did. Sankar had grown up sleeping beside the bulls in the cattle shed, his hand on the big one’s flank through the night. He knew what his mother meant.

The Challenge Before the Nattamai

The twins went to the nattamai the next morning. The sun had barely cleared the coconut palms. Ponnar spoke plainly. He said: our father’s half-brothers say there is no share for us. We say there is. Let the land speak for itself.

The nattamai was an old man who had seen this kind of trouble before, though not usually with men as large as Ponnar and Sankar standing before him. He asked what they proposed.

Sankar said: give us the bulls and give us the field our father broke. If the bulls plow for us - if the earth turns - the field is ours. If the bulls refuse, we will leave.

Chinnasamy, who had been summoned, laughed. He had watched his men fail to move those bulls for three weeks. The animals had not eaten properly since Periyathambi died. They were half-starved and stubborn and possibly mad. Let the boys try, he said. Let the whole village come watch.

The nattamai agreed. He set the contest for the next day, at first light.

The Plowing

The whole village came. Women stood along the bund with children on their hips. The old men who had testified for Chinnasamy sat under the tamarind tree and looked uncomfortable. Chinnasamy and his brothers stood in a line with their arms crossed, seven of them, like a wall.

Sankar walked to the bulls alone. He did not carry a rope. He did not carry a stick. He put his hand on the big bull’s neck and spoke to it in a voice no one else could hear. The bull lifted its head. The second bull shifted its weight and turned to look at Sankar with one dark eye.

Sankar yoked them. His hands were steady. Ponnar stood at the field’s edge holding the iron-tipped plow their father had used, the wood handle worn smooth where Periyathambi’s palms had gripped it ten thousand times.

They started at the eastern edge, where the palmyra stumps were piled. Sankar guided the bulls. Ponnar held the plow. The blade bit into the red earth and turned it. A clean furrow, dark and wet underneath, opened behind them. The bulls moved as though they had been waiting for this - as though three weeks of refusal had been nothing but patience, held in reserve for the right hands.

They plowed one furrow. Then another. The field was not small. It took most of the morning. By the time the sun was overhead, the entire plot lay in fresh-turned rows, and the bulls stood at the far end breathing hard, their flanks dark with sweat, and Sankar’s hand was still on the big one’s neck.

No one on the bund said anything for a long moment.

The Boundary Stones

The nattamai walked the perimeter of the plowed field. He counted the furrows. He looked at Chinnasamy and said nothing, which was itself a judgment.

Chinnasamy left. His brothers left with him. The two old witnesses left before anyone could look at them.

That afternoon, Ponnar and Sankar carried stones from the Noyyal riverbed and set them at the four corners of their father’s field. The stones were rough granite, each one heavy enough that it took both brothers to place it. They drove them into the earth so deep that no plow would unseat them and no man could pull them out alone.

Thamarai came to see the stones before dark. She touched the nearest one with her palm, the way she might touch a child’s forehead. She did not say anything about justice or rightness or what her husband was owed. She looked at the turned earth and the stones and her two sons standing in the last of the daylight, and she went home to cook rice.

The field stayed in the family. The stones stayed where they were set. In the koothu performances that the Kongu Nadu bards enact across multiple nights, this episode comes early - before the war, before the deaths, before everything that the land dispute set in motion. The bards say the bulls never worked for anyone else again. When the twins finally died, the bulls lay down and did not get up.