Poompuhar: The Lost Chola Port Beneath the Waves

Where the Kaveri finally reaches the Bay of Bengal, in Mayiladuthurai district, lies a modest fishing settlement called Poompuhar — also known as Kaveripoompattinam, or simply Puhar. It is one of the quietest of Tamil Nadu’s coastal towns, yet Tamil tradition remembers it as one of its grandest: the great port-capital of the early Cholas, a cosmopolitan harbour that traded with the wider ancient world and was, by legend, swallowed whole by the sea.

A port-capital of the Sangam age

In the Sangam period — roughly the last centuries BCE and the first centuries CE — Puhar served as a chief port and, by tradition, a capital of the early Chola dynasty. Sangam poetry describes a bustling twin-town divided into a seaward merchants’ quarter and an inland royal quarter, with warehouses, a bazaar and a lighthouse-beacon guiding vessels in.

The town looked outward. Classical Tamil literature and later scholarship associate Puhar with maritime trade reaching Rome and the Mediterranean, as well as Sri Lanka and South-East Asia — a meeting point where merchants, sailors and goods from distant lands passed through the Kaveri’s mouth. It is this vivid, sea-facing prosperity that fixed Poompuhar in the Tamil imagination.

The city of the Silappatikaram

Poompuhar’s deepest hold on memory comes through the Silappatikaram, the great Tamil epic traditionally attributed to Ilango Adigal. Much of its opening is set in Puhar, and the poem is treasured as much for its portrait of the port as for its tragic tale. In the story, the merchant Kovalan, married to the virtuous Kannagi, is drawn away by the celebrated courtesan-dancer Madhavi; having squandered his wealth, he returns to Kannagi, and the couple leave for Madurai — where a false charge over her golden anklet sets the epic’s tragedy in motion.

These events belong to literary tradition rather than documented history, but they made Puhar a byword for Tamil high culture. That legacy is retold today at the town’s seven-storey Silappathikaram Art Gallery, whose sculptured panels — carved, it is said, by artists trained at Mamallapuram — narrate the epic, with an anklet-shaped tank and statues of Kannagi and Madhavi in its grounds.

Swallowed by the sea

A persistent tradition holds that the old city was destroyed and drowned by the sea — a great flood or a devastating wave that reclaimed much of the ancient port. Later Tamil literature, including the sequel epic Manimekalai, echoes this loss. Whether it records a real inundation, gradual coastal erosion, or a purely legendary catastrophe, the image of a splendid city gone beneath the waves has shadowed Poompuhar for centuries.

Modern marine archaeology has given the legend an intriguing edge. Offshore surveys — notably those associated with archaeologist S. R. Rao and the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) from the 1980s onwards — reported submerged structures, brick formations, ring-wells and pottery on the seabed off the coast, at depths of roughly twenty to thirty metres, with further anomalies detected by side-scan sonar and never yet dived. These findings should be read carefully: they are attributed to the surveying bodies, remain debated, and do not by themselves confirm the epics. In 2025 the Tamil Nadu State Department of Archaeology began a fresh phase of underwater investigation off the coast to probe the question anew.

Poompuhar today

The modern town wears its legend lightly. Besides the art gallery, visitors come for the Pallavaneswarar Temple, a Shiva shrine that carries the town’s older devotional heritage, and for the long, open Poompuhar beach where the river meets the sea beneath a working lighthouse. Stalls of sun-dried fish, a monument beside the shore and the plain rhythms of a fishing village fill the foreground of a place whose grandest chapter lies, by tradition, just offshore and out of sight.

This low-lying coast is also part of Tamil Nadu’s tsunami-affected shoreline, struck in 2004, a reminder of the sea’s power that lends the old drowning-legend an uneasy resonance. To place Poompuhar within the wider sweep of the region’s temple heritage, read our guides to the /india/tamil-nadu/guides/great-living-chola-temples and to the /india/tamil-nadu/guides/chidambaram-nataraja-story.