An embodiment of justice and wrath caught up in controversy

Kannagi is a character in the epic Silappadhikaram who stands for justice. When her husband Kovalan is unjustly accused of stealing the queen’s anklet and executed, she is both devastated and wrathful. Showing the Pandya king of Madurai the matching anklet of rubies she possesses, she demands to know why her husband was executed without an investigation or fair trial. She then curses the city, and in an act of rage, burns it all down.

In Madras, the statue of Kannagi was first installed on the Marina in 1968 under the then DMK government at the beginning of the Second World Tamil Conference, a gift from students and teachers.

The Kannagi statue when it was first installed in 1968.
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THE HINDU ARCHIVES

In December 2001, however, the statue ‘disappeared’, apparently after its pedestal was damaged by a speeding lorry. It was later traced to a locked room in the PWD office. The then AIADMK Chief Minister O. Panneerselvam virtually ruled out its reinstallation on the Marina, leading to a raging political controversy.

Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi on May 15, 2006 inspecting the Kannagi statue that was being kept at the Government Museum in Chennai.
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File photo

As the agitation threatened to snowball and the court became involved, the statue was subsequently moved to the Government Museum, Egmore, where it was ‘found lying flat on the dusty floor’. It was only in 2006, when the DMK returned to power that the statue made a triumphant return to the Marina.