The Colas c25.43

c25.43

Śēkkiḻār narrates at length how the Lord Śiva, out of his grace, saved Sundaramūrtti from falling into the miseries of family life by appearing before him as a Brahmin on the eve of his marriage and claiming him as his bondslave. In his ignorance, Sundaramūrtti at first contests the claim; but the intrepid old Brahmin insists on his claim being settled before Sundaramūrtti marries, and the dispute is taken before the law-court of Tiruveṇṇai-nallūr.¹²⁰ In the *sabhā* of learned Brahmans, the plaintiff's case (*muraippāḍu*) is first stated; an objection is raised by the judges that the plaint is in violation of usage which forbids a Brahmin being enslaved under any conditions; the plaintiff answers that a deed of perpetual bondage on behalf of himself and his descendants had been executed by the grandfather of the defendant, and asks indignantly whether it is a proper method of winning a case to tear up the evidence produced by the opposite side which Sundaramūrtti had done earlier in the proceedings before the parties reached the court-house; at this stage the judges express their approval of the old Brahmin's arguments and require the defendant to state his plea; deeply agitated, Sundaramūrtti confesses to a feeling of utter amazement, appeals to the personal knowledge of the judges that he was an *ādiśaiva* of the village, and states that he feels too bewildered to find an answer to the preposterous claim of the plaintiff; the judges then turn to the plaintiff and require him to prove the unusual claim put forward by him by one of the three methods, usage (*āṭci*), documents (*āvaṇam*), or the testimony of eyewitnesses (*ayalār-tangaḷ-kāṭci*); the plaintiff now avers that the document destroyed by the defendant was only a copy, and that the original deed was still with him and that he would produce it, if its safety was guaranteed by the court; the original deed is then produced, the *karaṇattān* takes charge of the document which is in the form of a roll, unrolls it and reads it out; the apparent age of the document, its contents, the signatures of witnesses which are scrutinised and found to be regular, and a comparison with another document from the record office¹²¹ known to have been written in the hand of Sundaramūrtti's grandfather establish the genuineness of the deed by which he is seen to have pledged himself and his descendants to eternal slavery to the Pittan (Śiva) of Tiruveṇṇainallūr, and this concludes the investigation. The judges at once pronounce judgment that Nambi Ārūran had lost his case to the Brahmin sage, and that he was in fact the slave of the plaintiff. What followed need not be pursued here.