Eyarkon Kalikama

Eyarkon Kalikama Nāyanār — 'Kalikama, lord of the Eyar' — was a chieftain of the Eyar line in the Chola country and one of the sixty-three Nāyanārs. His hagiography is unusual: its central conflict is not between devotee and unbeliever, but between two saints.

The story

Kalikama was a devout and open-handed Shaiva, but he was scandalized by Sundarar. The poet-saint, tradition tells, had twice sent Shiva himself as messenger to his beloved Paravai — and to Kalikama this was intolerable presumption, the god made an errand-boy. He would not speak Sundarar's name with honour. Shiva, the Periya Puranam says, chose to end the quarrel in his own way: he afflicted the chieftain with a wracking pain of the bowels and declared it curable by no hand but Sundarar's. Rather than owe his life to the man he had scorned, Kalikama cut open his own belly and died.

Sundarar arrived to find the household concealing the death. When the truth broke, his grief was such that he resolved not to outlive the man who had died refusing him — and at that extremity Shiva restored Kalikama to life. The two devotees embraced, the tradition holds, and remained bound in friendship after.

What the tale carries

The story examines pride wearing the dress of reverence. Kalikama's outrage on the god's behalf is itself the fault to be burned away, yet the canon does not diminish him for it: his willingness to die rather than compromise is honoured even as it is overruled. Among the Nayanar legends it is the sharpest portrait of devotion quarrelling with devotion, and of a god who reconciles his servants by force.