Shiva's sixty-four games in Madurai

In Madurai the Tamil tradition tells Shiva's story as a run of sixty-four small episodes rather than one cosmic drama. Paranjothi Munivar's poem gathers them in three cantos of eighteen, thirty and sixteen games, set across the reigns of fifty-two Pandya rulers and a handful of others. The god of these games is the city's own: he arrives as a labourer, a woodcutter, an old man or a stranger, corrects a poet's verse, sells bangles, carries earth for a dam, and leaves the town changed. The Madurai temple still stages the games as painted panels and festival scenes, so the text works as the city's memory of its god.