Kochengat Chola

Kochengat Chola — Kochengannan, the red-eyed king — is one of the sixty-three Nayanar saints of Tamil Shaivism and among the earliest Chola kings of whom Tamil memory speaks. He stands at an unusual junction: a figure of early heroic poetry who was later absorbed into the Shaiva canon as a temple-building saint.

The legend

Tradition attaches to him one of the best-known rebirth stories in Tamil Shaivism. At Tiruvanaikka, on the island of Srirangam’s sister shrine, a spider spun its web over a linga beneath a jambu tree to shield it from falling leaves; a temple elephant swept the web away each day. The enmity ended with both dead — the spider having crawled into the elephant’s trunk — and the spider was reborn as a Chola prince. His mother, the story adds, held back his birth to await an auspicious hour, and the child emerged with reddened eyes: Ko-chengannan, the red-eyed one. Remembering his former life, the king built for Shiva shrines raised on high plinths, madakkoyils, which no elephant could enter; tradition credits him with some seventy of them across the Kaveri country.

In poetry and canon

Kochengannan appears in early Tamil war poetry — the Kalavali Narpadu celebrates his victory over a Chera king — and centuries later the Tevaram hymnists sang of his temple-building piety. Sekkilar gave him his chapter among the sixty-three, and later Chola kings, raising stone temples of their own, could look back on him as ancestor and precedent: the dynasty’s builder-saint.