The stories your parents never told you

Sundarar, the youngest of the three great Tamil Saiva saints, married Paravai in Tiruvarur and Sangili in Tiruvotriyur, and could not bear to be far from either. When he finally broke a vow and Sangili's curse blinded him, the same Lord who had once stopped his first wedding became a foot-messenger between his two houses. The Periya Puranam tells the story without judgement — Saiva sainthood, in the Tamil reading, is not the absence of human entanglement; it is what happens when human entanglement is loved fully enough to become divine.

When the Pandyan king of Madurai executed her husband on a false charge of theft, Kannagi walked into court holding the proof — an anklet — and after the king had died of shame, she set fire to the city with her own body. The Silappathikaram is the only ancient epic in the world whose central act is a woman's public anger.

She came from Lanka. She read stars better than any astronomer in the king's court. Her father-in-law, the great Varahamihira, could not bear to be outshone by his son's wife. So he cut her tongue. Twelve hundred years later, Bengali farmers still recite her couplets to know when the rain will come.

In the mangrove islands where the Ganga finally meets the sea, every honey-collector and woodcutter — Hindu and Muslim alike — calls on a single goddess before stepping into tiger-country. Her name is Bonbibi, and her story begins not in Bengal at all, but in the deserts of Arabia.

King Indradyumna saw God in a dream and was told: a piece of fragrant wood will float to the shore of the eastern sea. Carve me from it. The carving was not finished — and that is the entire point.

Gopanna was the tax collector of Bhadrachalam under the Golconda Sultan. He used state revenue to build a temple to Rama, was thrown in prison for twelve years, and sang Telugu kirtanas that became the founding repertoire of South Indian devotional music. One night, the Sultan found six lakh gold coins on his pillow — paid by two travellers calling themselves Rama and Lakshmana.

Mahadevi was a 12th-century Kannada poet who married a king under one condition and broke the condition the moment he tried to enforce it. She walked out of his palace, removed her clothes, let her hair fall to her ankles, and walked into the forest singing vachanas to her real husband — Lord Chenna Mallikarjuna.

Thinnan was an illiterate forest hunter from the hills of Kalahasti. He worshipped Shiva by spitting water from his mouth onto the linga and offering wild boar meat as prasad. When the linga's eye began to bleed, he tore out his own eye to replace it — and reached for the second when the other eye began to bleed too.

अपनी विवाह की रात, लखिंदर साँप से मारा गया — मनसा देवी का उसके पिता के अहंकार पर बदला। बेहुला ने अपने पति का अंतिम संस्कार करने से इनकार किया। उसने एक बेड़ा बनाया, उसका शरीर उस पर रखा, और छह महीने तक नदी में बहती रही जब तक वह इंद्र और देवताओं के दरबार तक न पहुँची।