A stone inscription in the temple admires a rustic woman who prepared food for the Chola king
Men! Henceforth, even, by the slip of your tongue, don’t mention your wives in vernacular Tamil as Pendatti. If you mention so, you mean them as mere cooks of a king’s palace. Women too can be aware of this expression and prevent their husbands from mentioning them so. The word, whose origin is hardly known, was, once, used to mean the women, who worked as cooks in the palaces of kings.
As read from an article by the late epigraphist D.Sundaram, a stone inscription found at a temple in Kanyakumari finds a mention in it.
“Stone inscriptions generally contain information of gifts made to a temple, a king’s victory over his enemy troops, and so on. But, an epigraph at Guganatha Swamy Temple in Kanyakumari has a piece of different information” says Sundaram.
In the modern age, when a noon meal worker was not allowed to prepare food at a government school in Tirupur district a few years ago just because she is from a Dalit community, a stone inscription in the Guganatha Swamy Temple admires a rustic woman from Puliyur of Chola country who prepared food for the king Rajendra I, son of the great Rajaraja Chola.
“The temple, which was built by the Chola king Rajaraja I, could be in a dilapidated state in the dawn of the 20th century, as archaeologist T.A Gopinatha Rao compiled the inscriptions under the title Chozhar Kavettukal Aaru (The six stone inscriptions of the Chola period). Of the six, the one is about the woman who prepared food for Rajendra Chola I. “informs Sundaram.
The inscription, which admires Rajendra Chola I with his titles Gangai Kondan (The conqueror of the region on the banks of Ganges) and Kadaram Kondan (The conqueror of Kedah, a state in Malaysia), mentions that a woman by the name ‘Chozhakulavalli ‘prepared food for him.
The woman, who also presented as many as fifty goats to the temple for burning nandhavilakku (perpetually burning lamp), seems to be one of the most important women attendants" of the king, as she had the privilege of cooking food for the monarch.
The inscription defines her as Udayar Sri Rajendra Chozha Devarkku Thiruvamuthu Adum Pendatti.
The Tamil term ‘Aduthal’ refers to cooking. The place (Kitchen), where cooking is done, was called by different Tamil names such as ‘ Attil Palli’, ‘Adukalam’, ‘Madaipalli’ in the bygone era. However, today, the Tamil term for kitchen has got corrupted to ‘Adukkalai’