Ilango Adigal

Tamil literary tradition remembers Ilango Adigal as a Chera prince — by some accounts a younger brother of the celebrated king Cheran Senguttuvan — who set aside a claim to royal power to become a Jain ascetic (the title 'Adigal' denotes a religious renunciant). He is credited as the author of the Silappatikaram, the epic telling of Kannagi's grief and vindication after the wrongful execution of her husband Kovalan, and of the deification of Kannagi as the goddess Pattini following Senguttuvan's consecration of her temple. The prologue of the epic itself presents this royal-monk authorship story, though modern scholars debate how much of it reflects a genuine 2nd-century context versus later literary framing, given that linguistic analysis often places the epic's actual composition centuries later. Regardless of the exact history behind the attribution, Ilango Adigal's name has become inseparable from one of the most emotionally powerful and structurally ambitious works in the Tamil literary canon — a rare epic that moves its readers through all three of the ancient Tamil kingdoms in a single unified story.