The young Pandya king defeated the combined Chera, Chola and chieftain armies and took the name of the battlefield as his title.
01A vow before the battle
Nedunjeliyan had only just taken the Pandya throne when the league formed against him. The Purananuru keeps a poem in his own name, the vow of a young man who has heard his enemies laugh at him: if he does not scatter them, let his people call him a tyrant and let the poet Mangudi Marudan never sing of him. He marched north into the Chola country and met them at Talaiyalanganam, near present-day Tiruvarur. The allied army broke. From that day he was Talaiyalanganattu Seru Venra Nedunjeliyan, the Nedunjeliyan who won the fight at Talaiyalanganam.
02Madurai in two poems
The victory is the frame of two of the Ten Idylls. Mangudi Marudan’s Maduraikkanchi, the longest poem of the Pattuppattu, walks the reader through Madurai from dawn to night: the two market streets, the temple drums, the lamps of the night watch. Nakkirar’s Nedunalvadai shows the same king in a winter war camp, wakeful while the queen waits in the palace. Both poets address him as the victor of Talaiyalanganam. The Sangam corpus has no older or fuller picture of a Tamil capital than the one written for this king.
Talaiyalanganam made the Pandyas the leading Tamil power of their age, and the poems written for its victor are the best record of Sangam Madurai.