Karikala routed both crowned kings of the Tamil land; the wounded Chera king starved himself to death on the field.
01The wound in the back
Karikala was young when the Chera and Pandya kings came against him at Venni, a village a few hours’ walk from Thanjavur. The Porunararruppadai says he broke both crowned kings there in a single day. The Chera king, Perumcheral Adan, was struck by a weapon that passed through to his back. For a Tamil warrior a wound in the back was a wound of shame, whatever its cause. He sat down facing north on the field and refused food until he died, the rite the poems call vadakkiruttal. The Purananuru keeps a poet’s grief for him, and a second poem by a woman of Venni who told the victor, plainly, that the dead Chera had won more honour than he had.
02What Karikala built after
Venni gave Karikala the delta without a rival. The poets of the Pattinappalai describe his port of Kaveripumpattinam at the river mouth, its warehouses stamped with the tiger seal, ships unloading horses and pepper, and the customs men who never slept. Tamil and Telugu tradition, recorded in later inscriptions, credits him with raising the banks of the Kaveri, and the Kallanai at Tiruchirappalli is still named after him. The Cholas of the eleventh century traced their line back to him. Kovil Venni today has a Shiva temple, the Karumbeswarar, and the battlefield is rice land again.
Venni is the first named battle of Tamil history that the poets of its own day describe, and it set the Cholas over the Kaveri delta for generations.