User:Ram.karuppiah/sandbox

Seevalathi is a beautiful small village between Raja Singa Mangalam and Salaigramam. It shares its borders with Sathanoor, Kodanoor, Panchanoor, Pudukkottai, Sooriyankottai and Nanniyavur. Officially this is the fifty second village in Ilayangudi Panchayat Union Block. This village is the Panchayat Head of few villages namely, Kodanoor, Kalathur and Manjalpattinam. People from this village are primarily dependent on Farming like, cultivation, herding goats and cows. They cultivate Paddy, Chilli, Vegetables, sesame seeds, Coriander and cotton. Some times they also cultivate Plaintains and Sugarcane, but those are very rare crops. This village has a reservoir also known as "Kanmai". Reservoirs are usually linked to a river system either through a main creek or a channel, but the channel connecting this reservoir was not maintained for decades and therefore never could get access to the river system since known memories, even during flooding times. There is a Panchayat Union Primary School with a single teacher handling all the classes from 1-5. People have lost confidence in the government provided education system, therefore children have fled this school to private education in the nearby villages like Salaigramam. There are 70 households in this village sharing the population with two major religions of Hinduism and Christianity vertically distributed to 7 castes namely, Konar, Maravar, Nadar, Pallar, Parayar, Navithar and Sakkiliyar.

Even though Seevalathi, never had any muslims living in this village, this village is patronising a darga, known as Kandumekkiyar Kovil. There is an annual festival of Kanduri, celebrated on the last Friday of tamil month of Aavani. In this event, villagers dedicate goats or chickens for the feast, an Islamic preacher from the nearby village of vandal is invited to say prayer and bless the meat in a halal manner, cook food and distribute this food in a indiscriminative sit down feast in freshly shaped palm containers called "pattai". This Darga is owned by a trust of a committee formed by the village and there are a number of acres donated by the villagers for the maintenance of this Darga. Villagers' Devotion to this Darga and Kandumekki is very much sincere and evidently practiced. People bring their cows and leave it in this Darga Campus if the cow has difficulty in milking, the next day it milks without trouble. People don't take any material from this premises.

The story of this Darga is very interesting, few hundred years ago there was a Sivite sage, Kandumekki Siththar who went to Mekkah in search of his true disciple, he became involved with islam and converted into Muslim, upon his return to his village, he either was killed by villagers because they thought conversion was against their culture or he had a natural death. He instructed the villagers to conduct his funeral in Islamic way which was unknown to the villagers at that time. As a repentance, they donated lands and built a Qabar for him and his sister, who could have also converted to Islam later. There are two burial spots within this Darga.

There is a Christian Chapel, five Hindu temples for Shri.Mariamman, Shri. Thiruppathamudiya Ayyanar, Shri Selva Vinayakar, Shri Muniyayya and Shri Sonaiya.