Mangayarkkarasiyar

Mangayarkkarasiyar — the name itself means queen among women — is one of the sixty-three Nayanar saints of Tamil Shaivism, and one of only three women in the canon, beside Karaikkal Ammaiyar and Isaignaniyar. A Chola princess by birth, she was married to the Pandya king Nedumaran of Madurai.

The story

The Periya Puranam sets her in a court dominated by Jain monks, with the king himself among their followers. Through those years the queen, together with the minister Kulachiraiyar, held to Shaivism and quietly sustained its devotees. When the king fell to a fever his court ascetics could not cure, she and the minister sent for Sambandar, the boy hymnist of Sirkazhi. The saint healed the king with sacred ash, defeated the Jain teachers in public ordeals, and returned the Pandya court to Shiva — the pivotal reconquest, in Shaiva memory, of the southern kingdom. Sambandar himself honours the queen by name in hymns of his Madurai visit, an unusual tribute from the canon’s most exalted voice.

Standing

Her sainthood is of a distinct kind: not ordeal or renunciation but constancy in an unfriendly court, and the political judgement to act at the decisive moment. The tradition credits her, as much as any hymnist, with the survival of Tamil Shaivism at the Pandya capital, and she remains among the most venerated of the women of the bhakti movement.