- Lived:
- unknowable — the epic's own epilogue makes him a Chera prince who renounced the throne of Vañci (in modern Kerala) to live as a Jain monk; the poem credited to him, the Cilappatikāram, took shape between roughly the 4th and 6th centuries CE, telling a story its own geography sets two or three centuries earlier
- Field:
- poetry — the first Tamil epic, and by any honest count the first epic anywhere in India whose hero is an ordinary woman
- The Big Idea:
- Justice is not a king's gift; it is a law above the king. A merchant's wife proves a royal verdict wrong with a piece of physical evidence, the king dies of his own injustice on the spot, and a city burns — no god required.
- In their words:
- "When kings bend justice, righteousness itself becomes their executioner; the great of this earth will bow to a wife of great renown; and old deeds ripen, arrive, and exact their due." (the three truths the Cilappatikāram's prologue announces; our rendering)
- If you remember one thing:
- Twenty centuries before anyone said "rule of law," a Tamil poet built an epic on the idea — and gave the case for it not to a god or a prince but to a widowed shopkeeper's daughter holding a broken anklet.