Tamil Nadu’s cultural capital older than most empires
Madurai anchors southern Tamil Nadu as cultural capital and district headquarters, run by a municipal corporation founded 1 November 1866. One of South Asia’s oldest cities, it hosted a Tamil Sangam under the Pandyas and appears in records from the third century BCE. Industry and colleges now share the temple city’s streets.
Sangam lore places a major assembly of Tamil scholars here under Pandyan patronage, tying the modern municipality to classical language politics. Continuous urban memory stretches more than two millennia, rare even among India’s ancient centres.
Factories turn out automobiles, rubber, chemicals and granite, while government campuses such as Madurai Medical College, the Homeopathic Medical College and Madurai Law College draw students. The city is also among those chosen for the national AMRUT urban-renewal mission. According to the epigraphist Iravatham Mahadevan, a Tamil-Brahmi inscription of the second century BCE calls it matiray, Old Tamil for a walled city.
Another tradition says the site was once a forest of kadamba trees, hence the old name Kadambavanam. It is also called Koodal, meaning an assembly of scholars, after the three Tamil Sangams, and Naanmadakoodal, the junction of four towers, after its four great temples. The Sangam-era settlement of Keeladi, dating to the sixth century BCE, lies about 12 kilometres southeast. Megasthenes may have described the city as Methora, though some scholars think he meant Mathura in the north, and the Sri Lankan chronicle Mahavamsa says envoys came here seeking a bride for Prince Vijaya.
The Pandyas under Kadunkon drove out the Kalabhras around 590 CE, and by the seventh century Madurai was their main capital. It passed to direct British East India Company rule in 1801 as part of the Madras Presidency. In 1921 Mahatma Gandhi first adopted the loincloth here after seeing farm labourers wearing it. The municipality became a corporation in 1971, and in 2011 it grew from 72 to 100 wards and to about 148 square kilometres. Streets form concentric squares around the Meenakshi and Koodal Azhagar temples, a plan reworked by Viswanatha Nayak in the sixteenth century, and festival chariots grow larger on the outer rings.
Source: Madurai
