The Hill that Remembers

SOME PLACES EXIST in multiple dimensions at once: geographic, mythic, historical, literary, political. Thiruparankundram in Tamil Nadu is one of them. It is a hill, yes, and a temple, and a contested site of re­ligious ownership, and a metaphor for how civilisations layer themselves onto landscapes. Its history is impossibly crowded, with arcs of dynasties, wars, pilgrimages, Sangam poets shaping its contours in verse, Jain monks carving austerities into its caves, Shaivite saints singing it into permanence. If you read Thirumuru­gatrupadai, a Tamil poem composed between the second and the fourth centuries CE, you’d find Thiruparankundram is named first among Murugan’s six sacred abodes. The poet, Nakkirar, is essentially writing an ancient travel guide for devotees, directing them to the places where Murugan’s presence is most immediate. The poem speaks of Thiruparankundram as an event, not just a location—something that happens to those who approach it.

What sets Thiruparankundram apart from the thousands of temples that dot Tamil Nadu is not the sculptural detail, or the massive rajagopuram (shrine at the main gateway) or even the unusual convergence of deities—Murugan, Deivayanai, Shiva, Vishnu, Durga, Ganapathy, all coexisting under one roof. It is the mythic wedding that takes place here, again and again, in ritual, in belief, in time itself. It is here that Murugan, after defeating Surapadma, weds Deivayanai, the daughter of Indra, king of the gods, in a marriage that is both celebration and cosmic realign­ment. Love follows war, creation follows destruction, order is restored. This is why Thiruparankundram, even today, is an auspicious site associated with marriage and union.

And yet, Murugan was not its first occupant. Long before Tamil devotional poets claimed it, Jain monks had carved meditation chambers into its slopes. Their presence, so much earlier than the temple’s, complicates any single ownership claim—something inconvenient in the modern world, where land and faith have be­come indistinguishable commodities. By the time of the Pandyas, the gods of silence had been replaced by a god of action. Murugan was no longer just an adolescent warrior but a groom, marrying Deivayanai in a temple excavated from the very body of the hill.

Permanence is a slippery thing. What has endured across centuries—a sacred hill, a temple, a complex palimpsest of histories—can still be pulled into contemporary disputes, flat­tened into a political symbol. The British Privy Council’s 1931 ruling reaffirmed Hindu ownership of Thiruparankundram, except for the site of Sikkandar Dargah. But ownership in such places is never just legal, it is emotional, ideological, interpreta­tive. Today, contested claims flare up again. The dargah, located on Thiruparankundram hill, has now become the epicentre of this conflict. Its history dates back to the 14th century during the Madurai Sultanate’s rule under Sikandar Shah. After his defeat at the hands of Vijayanagara ruler Kumara Kampana, his followers established the dargah as a memorial. From that time, they have been worshipping at the shrine. Tensions at the site flared up on December 4, 2024, when a complaint was filed against the Dargah Managing Trust for installing a notice board stating that rituals of Kandhuri festival—which usually mark the death of a Muslim saint—could be conducted at the hilltop dargah. Fol­lowing the complaint, the board was removed. But the issue is a lot older, says S Vanchinathan, a Madurai-based advocate and human rights activist.

“Every year, for the past two decades, on Karthigai Deepam, Hin­du activists have been protesting near the dargah for permission to worship there, but this didn’t get any political traction. Two years ago, there was a controversy regarding the height of the kodimaram [a sacred tall pillar] at the dargah and a peace meeting was held. In 2023, the Sangh parties filed a case asking the court to put an end to all worship at the mosque and the dargah. Last year, a case was filed petitioning the court to bar animal sacrifice at the site,” says Vanchinathan. Even as these cases were pending in court, when a family headed to the dargah with animal offerings was stopped by policemen citing “an order”, things came to a head. On Decem­ber 31, 2024, a peace meeting led by the Thirumangalam revenue divisional officer ruled that existing worship practices should con­tinue, as neither the dargah administrators nor the Tamil Nadu Hindu Religious & Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) Department could provide evidence supporting the tradition of Kandhuri ritu­als. By January 5, 2025, a larger group of Muslim devotees gathered at the hill, demanding access to the dargah for prayers. This time, the police refused outright, citing security concerns.

“The district administration is the root cause of the problem. From the policemen who stopped pilgrims from visiting the dar­gah to the HR&CE officers who sought to put an end to Kandhuri rituals and the RDO who misinterpreted the Muslims’ walkout at the peace meeting and effectively legitimised putting an end to animal sacrifice and night and morning prayers at the shrine, ev­ery step is suspicious,” says a senior All India Anna Dravida Mun­netra Kazhagam (AIADMK) leader and former minister. “The question is, when Hindu outfits stormed the temple and courted arrest even as Section 144 was imposed, why did the ruling DMK government let them off so easily? Both BJP and DMK stand to gain from the matter. It is a non-issue that has been politicised.”

Speaking to Open, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) Gen­eral Secretary and Cabinet minister Durai Murugan said the prac­tice of animal slaughter at the dargah was decades if not centuries old and that there was no reason for the sudden flare-up of tensions around it. “Hindus here are not so insecure that they need to shut down an Islamic house of worship. Hindutva forces have tried their best to turn it into an issue with an eye on the Assembly elections where they want to contest the seat, but the people here can tell reality from drama,” he said.

To maintain law and order, the Madurai district administra­tion had imposed restrictions on public gatherings in the area. Despite these measures, Hindu Munnani, a state-based Hindu right-wing organisation, secured permission to hold a protest in Madurai’s Palanganatham on February 4, mobilising over 3,000 participants. Scholars have meanwhile pointed out that Muru­gan, a Dravidian god, is described in Sangam texts as a primordial deity not averse to eating meat and blood. He has evolved from a Tamil deity to a Puranic one, transforming his identity over time. By the time the ninth and tenth centuries rolled in, significant changes had been made in temple traditions, including the im­position of Vedic rituals. In recent years, there has been a growing effort to inherently link Hinduism to vegetarianism, leading to political debates and legal interventions. In 2003, the then-Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa imposed a ban on animal sac­rifice in temples. However, due to strong public opposition, the order was repealed in 2004, highlighting the deep entrenchment of these traditions and the challenges any gov­ernment faces in addressing them.

The heart of the argument however is not just about rituals or sacrifices, it is about ownership. The earliest inhabitants of Thiru­parankundram were the Arivars, a social group that predated the Jains. Sangam-era texts—Tol­kappiyam, Thirukkural, Silappadhikaram—offer glimpses of a world that existed before temples. The Jains arrived later, in the second or third century CE, leaving behind inscriptions on the hillsides. One of them, a Jain monk, is said to have fasted to death on this very hill in the sixth century. Then came the Pandyas. In the eighth century CE, Parantaka Nedunjadayan II built the temple that now dominates the hill.

BJP has seized on the issue. Leaders like H Raja have come out swinging, even suggesting that Thiruparankundram could become “another Ayodhya”—a quiet but unmistakable invitation for escalation. DMK, meanwhile, is playing the role it has perfected: the defender of Tamil Nadu’s secularism, the last barrier against the ‘commu­nalism’ of the North. Chief Minister MK Stalin has urged the public to resist attempts at division, positioning his party as the one thread still holding the social fabric together. It is an effective strategy, particularly in a state where Hindutva politics have never fully taken root. And yet, DMK, too, benefits from this dispute. A BJP bogeyman allows the party to consolidate its hold on minority voters while reinforcing its credentials as the anti-communal alternative. Which is to say: it is possible to be both the defender of secularism and a political beneficiary of its erosion.

Maduraireligious politicssacred spaceSikkandar DargahTamil NaduThiruparankundram