Kannagi, Kovalan and the shackles of expectation

“Kannagi Kovalanai yeatrukonda madhiri, Kovalan, Kannagi innuro oru manidhanai kadhalithirundhal, uthhama purushanaga irrundhu, yetrukonduirrupana?”

(Just as Kannagi forgave and accepted Kovalan, had she loved another man, would Kovalan have been a chaste and loyal husband and accepted her return?)

-       Iraivi (2016)

The Silappadhikaaram or the iconic legend of a love story between Kovalan and Kannagi, is a household story in most Tamil families. Kannagi is hailed as nothing less than a goddess, for her chastity and loyalty. For which man would not want a wife like her? Someone who forgives all of his vile mistakes and consumes an entire city in flames, to avenge a man who could not, at the very least, stay loyal to her.

The legend goes that Kannagi and Kovalan, a fairly well-to-do merchant couple, live in the port city of the Chola kingdom. At a festival, Kovalan, captivated by the beauty and wits of Madhavi, a courtesan, neglects his marriage, abandons Kannagi, and squanders his wealth on this new love. For a year or so, then, he provides Madhavi with all of the land’s riches as Kannagi waits back at home, quiet, devoted, and forgiving. Now for the next part, some say that Kovalan is randomly overcome by a surge of guilt and thus willfully returns to his doting wife, while others say that an argument with Madhavi causes him to stumble back to Kannagi rather conveniently. But the version I find most believable is that Madhavi refuses to be available to him at his beck and call, to be bought in whole by his riches, and hurt by this grave insult, he leaves this promiscuous lady, and so overcome by guilt and completely out of remorse, goes back home. Home to an ever-virtuous Kannagi who forgives him and accepts her now penniless husband. The story is only half finished so far, but Kannagi already gets established as this constantly giving, eternal source of virtue and piety, depicted solely by her acceptance of a disloyal man. It is here that I would like to pause and ask you to guess the gender of the author of this legend. I know your guess is spot on.

Moving on, long story short, Kovalan goes to the capital city (Madurai) to earn some money after he so generously depleted all he had on fleeting love. There, he gets wrongfully accused of a crime and executed for the same by the royal family. Angered, brave Kannagi confronts the king, proves her husband’s innocence, and in an act of revenge, burns the capital city to mere ashes. The myth then goes that the gods themselves descend on earth, drawn by Kannagi’s rage and in some versions, bring Kovalan back to life, and in others, apologize to her; But in both, cement her as an edifice of piety and virtue by way of courage.

Now, the center point of this story, remarkably so, is Kannagi. Her rage, her courage, and her undying loyalty to her husband have made her an enduring symbol of the ideal wife in Tamil folklore; but her celebrated virtues are rooted less in her agency than in her acts of forgiving, enduring and remaining chaste in service of a man; more so, a man that betrayed her. 

The problem lies in why Kannagi is remembered and venerated. Though her final act of confronting the royal family and burning Madurai is an act of undeniable courage and agency, the bulk of her glorification in popular retellings rests on her virtue as a chaste wife, a patthini. She is idealized for waiting in loyalty for a man who abandoned her, for forgiving him without conditions, and for channeling her rage only in service of his vindication, never her own. When such stories become moral and cultural yardsticks, they shape gender expectations in enduring, concerning ways. The “ideal wife” archetype, endlessly patient, forgiving, and “devoted”, is perpetuated as a standard for women to achieve, while men will occasionally commit moral transgressions, but will be forgotten and forgiven with no consequences whatsoever, because men, right? Kannagi’s pain and humiliation are reframed as virtues, not injustices to resist, and her most decisive act is remembered not as self-assertion but as devotion to a wronged husband. By elevating Kannagi to goddess status, these traits are enshrined in devotional culture, making them harder to question. The result is a model of womanhood that ties female worth to chastity, endurance, and loyalty, rather than autonomy, dignity, or self-determination. And, in a society where men are rarely expected to fit into a single, saintly mould, one has to wonder why we even need a “model woman” in the first place. Such figures are most certainly not born from the soil of women’s own voices and ideas. They are results of dominant male imaginings, fetishes, even, of a silent, loyal, puppy-like wife. When retold without question, such stories quietly legitimise the hierarchies of gender and caste, making resistance seem unnatural. Reclaiming these narratives means dismantling that frame and seeing figures like Kannagi as complex, autonomous individuals, rather than obedient embodiments of virtue.

This moral mould that Kannagi personifies is barely unique. Kannagi is not alone in this pantheon of suffering women turned into cultural ideals, while faulty men serve no semblance of moral jail time . Think of Sita from the Ramayana, celebrated for her strength and purity even after being kidnapped, exiled, and doubted by her own husband, while said husband continues to enjoy deity status and zero consequences for accusing a woman who needed comforting. Or Draupadi from the Mahabharata, humiliated in a court full of men, her rage and resistance remembered only because it served the epic’s male-driven war, while again, the men who wagered their own wives on a game of dice, somehow remain the “good guys” of the story. 

These stories that are the pinnacle of regional Indian culture hold up sacrifice and chastity, often in the face of cruelty, as the highest moral calling for women. While men in the same narratives are afforded complexity, flaws, and redemption without having to prove themselves through suffering. This imbalance is not accidental; it is part of a cultural logic that treats women as the keepers of a family or community’s moral honour, while men are cast as its agents in the world. Women carry the burden of upholding a standard they did not set, while men enjoy the freedom to define their own. These literary trends reflect in the mighty cognitive dissonance of Indians, where women are apparently worshipped for being pure and virtuous, a reverence that crumbles the moment they fall outside the sanctioned script, devotion, so quickly turning into accusation and blame.

The harm is not locked in the past. Even today, women in their twenties are quietly and persistently measured against these molds. Popular media still plays its part in rewarding these “good” women - the dutiful wife who sacrifices her dreams for her husband’s career, the girlfriend who “waits” for a man to get his life together. They are framed as heroines, given the moral high ground, and badged as ideal. In contrast, women who leave, who refuse to forgive, or who put their own ambitions first are often portrayed as selfish, regretful, or in need of redemption through domesticity. This pattern of rewarding conformity and punishing defiance runs deep in our storytelling, and Kannagi’s tale is no exception.

The Kannagi example becomes especially potent here because it lays bare the transactional nature of idealisation. She is sanctified as the embodiment of chastity and righteous fury when her anger serves a communal sense of justice. Yet, in less convenient circumstances, a woman’s defiance or grief is no longer divine. It is suspect, unbecoming, and even punishable. That shift, from veneration to vilification, reveals how quickly the pedestal can become a scaffold. The Kannagi example is also crucial because it is not just an emblem of idealised Tamil womanhood, but it also exposes the cracks in that ideal. The same cultural imagination that reveres her as the paragon of chastity is also the one that, in the hypothetical of “Just as Kannagi forgave and accepted Kovalan, had she loved another man, would Kovalan have been a chaste and loyal husband and accepted her return?” makes it clear that the woman is venerated when she suffers silently in loyalty, but abandoned, disbelieved, or blamed if her suffering disrupts male honour. The same society that mythologises her sacrifice will, in another breath, strip her of dignity if she falls outside the sanctioned ideal. By returning to Kannagi’s imagined rejection, we see that the expectations placed on women are not simply high; They are self-contradictory, impossible to inhabit without reducing every last grain of logic and morality to a blip.

And so, even in a country that celebrates 78 years of political independence, half its people remain bound to invisible chains. Chains woven from ancient archetypes, colonial morality, caste patriarchy, and uninformed, abstract nationalism. What does independence mean when it is conditional, when its freedoms are extended selectively, and when the cost of stepping outside the script is still paid in heavy disproportion?  Perhaps the harder question is not when women will be free, but whether the nation is ready to imagine freedom that does not depend on their obedience.

-by Anavadya