Manimekalai
மணிமேகலை
Also Manimekhalai, The Dancer with the Magic Bowl.
Poetry Tamil Probably sixth century
What it is
Manimekalai is the Buddhist Tamil epic, the companion to the Silappatikaram, and it follows the daughter of Kovalan and the courtesan Madhavi as she refuses the life she was born to, becomes a Buddhist nun, and devotes herself to feeding the hungry with a bowl that never empties. It is the only surviving Tamil Buddhist epic and one of the very few Indian works whose heroine chooses renunciation over marriage and is not punished for it. Its last book is a survey of the philosophical schools of the day, written to refute them.
Its shape
Thirty cantos by Sattanar, a grain merchant of Madurai, written as a sequel to the Silappatikaram and sharing its characters. The narrative occupies most of it; the final cantos turn to logic and doctrine, setting out and demolishing the positions of the Jains, the Ajivikas, the Samkhyas, the Lokayatas and others, and ending with an exposition of Buddhist causation. That last section is a primary source for schools of Indian philosophy otherwise known only from their opponents.
What it argues about
These are not settled texts
The epic argues for Buddhism against its rivals explicitly, which is why it survives as a philosophical source and why it has been read as propaganda. Its more interesting argument is social: the heroine is the daughter of a courtesan, she is pursued by a prince and refuses him, and the whole plot turns on her insistence on feeding people rather than on any devotional or romantic resolution. The Tamil tradition largely lost its Buddhism and the poem with it, and it was recovered and printed only in 1898 by U. V. Swaminatha Iyer, which is why it is far less known than the Silappatikaram it continues.
Episodes worth knowing
The bowl that does not empty
Manimekalai is given the Amudhasurabhi, a begging bowl that produces food without limit, and is told that it will fill when first offered by a woman who has never broken a vow. She finds such a woman, and from then on she feeds anybody who comes, including in a prison she persuades a king to turn into a refuge. The epic’s climax is not a marriage or a battle but the conversion of a jail into a place where the hungry are fed, which is an unusual thing for an epic of any tradition to drive at.
Refusing the prince
Prince Udayakumaran pursues her through much of the poem, and she avoids him by changing form, by argument and finally by taking the robe. He is killed, not by her, and she is imprisoned by his mother. She does not relent at any point and the poem does not require her to. Compared with the Silappatikaram, in which Kannagi’s agency is unleashed by catastrophe, Manimekalai’s is a series of deliberate refusals made from the beginning, and Tamil feminist criticism has made a good deal of the contrast.
Whose telling
There is no single text
- Sattanar
- Named in the text as Kulavanigan Sattanar, a grain merchant of Madurai and a contemporary of Ilango Adigal.
- U. V. Swaminatha Iyer, 1898
- Recovered and printed the palm leaf manuscripts; without that work the poem would almost certainly have been lost.
- Philosophical source
- The final cantos preserve accounts of the Ajivika and Lokayata positions that survive almost nowhere else, and are cited by historians of Indian philosophy.
Where the regions differ
- Tamil
- Kerala
- Telugu
- Kannada
- North
- Maharashtra
- Bengal
- Punjab
- Assam
- Sri Lanka
- Nepal
- Gujarat
- Odisha
- Mithila
- Kashmir
- Tulu Nadu
- manipur
- rajasthan
- konkani
- sindhi
- jharkhand
- himalayan
- kodava
- Tamil Nadu
- The Buddhist Tamil epic, recovered in 1898, taught in literature courses and claimed by Tamil Buddhist revival movements.
- Sri Lanka
- Read as evidence of the Buddhist connection between the island and the Tamil country, and the poem names places on both sides.
Connected to
Deities
Arts
Festivals
Related works