Chozha kingship’s dharmic duty to protect subjects

Chozha kingship’s dharmic duty to protect subjects is an ethical standard against which the novel measures public authority: the kingdom should secure ordinary people from violence, protect those most exposed to harm, and answer injustice with practical aid. The standard is voiced most sharply after Mandhakini is abducted in daylight, and tested again when a cyclone devastates the realm. Its force lies in the contrast between assurances of just rule and the danger, incapacity, and secrecy that repeatedly frustrate those assurances.

The ethical standard and its test

Poonguzhali argues that a kingdom renowned for honour and dharma cannot excuse the daylight seizure of an old woman who can neither speak nor hear. She recalls the belief that, since the time of Paranthaka Chakravarthy, even a child could travel safely from one end of the kingdom to the other, by day or night, under Sundara Chozhar’s benevolent rule. Mandhakini’s abduction makes that inherited confidence look fragile. For Poonguzhali, the wrong matters not only because her aunt has been taken, but because the same failure of protection could become the fate of every maiden in the kingdom.

Her appeal is a demand for public justice, not merely a plea for private rescue. She threatens to take the case to the Pazhuvettarayar lords, then to Aniruddha Brahmaraayar, and finally to the queens and royal mothers of Pazhaiyarai if no one secures redress. The escalating list turns the kingdom’s hierarchy into a chain of responsibility: if one authority fails, the next must be made to answer. Her vow to keep seeking justice until she learns Mandhakini’s fate gives the ideal a persistent, personal advocate.

Safety, vulnerability, and self-protection

Amudhan agrees that danger to women is real and links the deterioration of public safety to Sundara Chozhar’s illness and withdrawal to his bed. He describes the failure in terms of basic safety, chivalry, and the duty to guard those in need; young women, he says, especially require protection. His proposed remedy—that women should marry at once to secure their safety—also reveals the limits of the society’s response. Rather than identifying a public institution capable of guaranteeing safety, he turns to marriage as a form of personal security.

Poonguzhali tests that proposal by asking whether Amudhan could actually defend a wife with a sword. He has learned to make flower garlands and sing devotional hymns, not to fight, but answers that he could learn weaponry as he learned to handle oars. Their exchange shifts protection from an abstract duty to a question of practical ability: good intentions alone do not make someone capable of defending another. At the same time, the conversation does not replace the kingdom’s responsibility with individual force; it makes visible how exposed people may be when public protection is uncertain.

The cyclone and the capacity to help

After the cyclone, Kundhavai presents herself to Aniruddha Brahmaraayar as Sundara Chozhar’s envoy. The king’s physical condition has not changed, she explains, but the storm has left him distressed by the suffering of poor people in flimsy huts and determined to provide assistance. His concern supplies a measure of royal obligation in action: distress among subjects calls for relief, not simply sympathy.

Aniruddha initially pleads that he has little practical power. Periya Pazhuvettarayar is away and has locked his treasure vault; even Chinna Pazhuvettarayar cannot access its wealth without permission. Aniruddha also says that people already wait at his gates with requests he fears he will have to refuse. Kundhavai answers by offering her own possessions, her mother’s belongings, and access to valuables in the palace, backed by her father’s assurance. The exchange distinguishes a ruler’s willingness to help from the resources and administrative access needed to make help possible.

Aniruddha warns that private offerings may be no more than kernels of corn against an elephant’s hunger. He has received no proper reports, but his disciple brings alarming news that the sea has surged inland and submerged towns from Kodikkarai to Nagapattinam. The women with Kundhavai react with sudden terror. Aniruddha then qualifies the report: it may be rumor, messengers have not yet arrived, and more reliable information is expected later. He nevertheless commits to offering what solace they can in the meantime. The scene makes relief an urgent duty under conditions of uncertainty, while showing how locked resources, missing reports, and the scale of destruction constrain its fulfilment.

Protection compromised by secrecy

Aniruddha’s confession about Mandhakini complicates any simple picture of royal service. Twenty-five years earlier, Sundara Chozhar had ordered him to find her. At Kodikkarai, witnesses believed she had leapt from the lighthouse into the sea and died. Aniruddha later saw that she had survived: a fisherman had rescued her and brought her ashore. Instead of reporting the rescue, Aniruddha bribed the fisherman to take her to Ilankai and keep her there, then told Sundara Chozhar she was dead. He says he acted to spare his friend pain, but acknowledges that the decision produced consequences he had not foreseen. His account places private judgment and concealment where a transparent response to a vulnerable person might have been expected.

Aniruddha also recalls later learning that Mandhakini had given birth to twins in Sembian Maadevi’s royal garden and sometimes returned secretly to see them. He suspected that she had saved the young Arulmozhi Varman after his fall into the Kaveri River, a conclusion Arulmozhi himself later supported. These acts of rescue and care occur through individuals and private circumstances, not through an evident system of public protection. Together with the abduction and the cyclone, they give the duty its narrative weight: the ideal is clear, but safety depends on whether those with authority, resources, and knowledge actually use them to protect others.