In Tamil Nadu, politics rarely travels by manifesto alone. It travels by chorus, hook, and refrain. From cinema halls to festival streets, from autos to kitchens, songs carry arguments as everyday idiom, making ideas repeatable and therefore durable. That durability matters because popular sovereignty is never unmediated. The central question is not only what “the people” think, but who gets to translate public feeling into common sense, and by what cultural technologies. Murugan sits at the centre of this mediation struggle.In contemporary contests, Murugan is increasingly treated as a prize to be captured, a symbol to be recoded into a nationalised and Sanskritised repertoire, disciplined by hierarchy and enclosed within a narrow politics of belonging. Popular Tamil music, however, keeps producing a different Murugan: not a priest-gated deity, but an ancestor, a leader, and a civic protector. This Murugan is not an emblem of exclusion. He is a grammar for shared life.A regional secularism that checks powerA standard assumption about secularism is that devotion must be pushed out of public life for equality to survive. Tamil Nadu’s political and cultural history points in another direction. Here, devotion is not automatically opposed to civic ethics. It is accepted so long as it is compatible with caste-critical equality and plural sociality. The test is not whether religion appears in public, but how it appears: in which language it speaks, how it distributes sacred goods, and whether shared sacred spaces are sustained without anxiety. This is why Murugan is uniquely available for civic engagement. Classical and folk lineages place him close to homes and hills, embedded in Tamil landscape and social life, rather than sealed behind exclusive ritual gates. The figure arrives already furnished with civic potential: authority narrated as kinship, leadership justified as protection, devotion voiced in Tamil as a shared right.The protective grammar of Kandha Sashti KavasamTo understand why Murugan travels so powerfully through sound, it helps to recognise a deeper reservoir: Kandha Sashti Kavasam and its grammar of protection. The Kavasam is Tamil in language, and its central image is the vel (spear) as safeguarding force. Its logic is intimate and bodily, naming the body part by part, invoking protection as care rather than conquest.Crucially, the “enemy” here is not your neighbour or a social minority. It is a mythic antagonist, a way of speaking about harm, fear, and vulnerability without invoking social division. Popular music inherits this protective impulse and pushes it outward. The “kakka”, to protect, expands from the individual body and household to the street, the shared shrine, and the plural neighbourhood. Protection becomes civic. The vel becomes less a weapon for domination and more a device for opening space, making room for people to gather without fear.Three songs, one argument: Murugan as an accessible entityThis civic Murugan becomes especially visible when we read three musical moments together: a cinema anthem tied to the 2007 film Billa and two independent tracks from 2025. They come from different production worlds and political conjunctures, yet converge on a shared claim: Murugan belongs to Tamil publics as a accessible, not to gatekeepers.“Seval Kodi Parakkuthada” (from Billa)The film anthem Seval Kodi Parakkuthada, with lyrics by Pa. Vijay and music by Yuvan Shankar Raja, stages Murugan through crowd-design. Call-and-response collapses the distance between singer and public, turning the cinema hall and even the pilgrimage walks into a civic space of repetition. Murugan appears as muppaattan, an elder-ancestor and leader whose charisma is civic rather than priestly. Its language politics is explicit: if the icon speaks Tamil, why address him in a “foreign” tongue.The target is monopoly, not devotion. Tamil-first worship becomes a way of making devotion shareable. Even when it sounds deeply devotional, the song is really teaching a public lesson. The chorus is not asking people to obey quietly. It is pulling everyone in, together. Here, leadership is earned through protection and fairness, not through birth, status, or priestly authority. Murugan becomes the figure through whom people learn to treat faith as something shared, and to keep a rational, questioning spirit alive alongside devotion.“Vetrivel” (Kelithee x ofRO x Santhosh Narayanan, 2025)The video opens with a compact thesis. “Do you pray to God?” “No.” Then a phone wallpaper reveals Murugan. Devotion is not refused. It is relocated from an abstract, priest-mediated absolute to a proximate relation embedded in daily life. Different people share the same space without any fuss, even a Christian priest appears naturally in the frame. It is not shown as a special “unity” moment. It is just normal life. The message is also very direct: prasadam is for everyone. No one needs permission. It is a right, not a favour. The language stays simple and close, speaking like a friend. And “Vetrivel” works as both devotion and a public call, where “victory” means everyone reaching something good together.“Kaakum Vadivel” (Vaaheesan, Dharan Kumar, Kripakarjay J, 2025)Here the song pushes inclusion further by naming outsider lineage with pride. The claim to an “Arakkan line” reverses demonology and converts stigma into dignity. The title itself, the protecting spear, fixes Murugan’s authority as guardianship rather than domination. The chorus makes a simple promise: one justice for everyone, and one town where everyone belongs. Authority is shown as something like a fair elder in the family, not a distant ruler. The song treats pilgrimage places as a shared route anyone can claim, not a test of who is “pure” enough. Protection is shown as everyday care, even wiping someone’s tears. And when the rap brings anger in, it does not turn into threats or swagger. It settles into the idea of keeping people safe and helping life return to normal.Across all three songs, the pattern is consistent. Murugan is sung as an ancestor who binds, a leader who protects, and a presence that expands access. Tamil is not merely a language choice. It is the medium through which devotion becomes public.Thiruparankundram, tradition, and the politics of accommodationThe struggle over Murugan is not confined to art. It is being fought in streets, courts, and social media feeds. The dispute at Thiruparankundram, which intensified in early 2025 and remains ongoing, is a reminder that shared sacred spaces are vulnerable to enclosure politics. What is at stake is not only the management of a hill or a ritual site. It is the meaning of tradition itself.Thiruparankundram reminds us that ritual change rooted in coexistence is tradition too. Accommodation is not an erosion of heritage. It is one of its enduring forms. The Dravidian movement long upheld such accommodation through a civic moral economy: it insisted that dignity, sharing, and plural sociality are not external to Tamil public life, but central to it. That tradition of coexistence is now pressured by a different politics, one organised around majoritarian victimhood and permanent grievance, a politics that thrives on converting local disputes into civilisational battles. This is precisely where songs matter. They do not merely comment on coexistence. They re-stage it as normal. They offer a Murugan who belongs to the neighbourhood, not to the barricade. They present protection as care, not conquest. They keep alive a civic instinct that refuses to let the sacred become a boundary-marker.Why appropriation struggles to stickAppropriation campaigns try to control the story by controlling the dissemination channels. They use camera-ready street rituals, a constant language of “threat” and “siege,” and social media tactics that blow local disputes into national outrage. It creates noise and heat, but heat is not consent. In Tamil public life, common sense is held together by everyday coexistence, local memory, humour, and quick counter-stories. Manufactured panic struggles to stick because it collides with habits built over decades, including the habits that songs keep renewing. That is why the Murugan of popular Tamil music resists being squeezed into a single ideological mould. He keeps returning as plural, egalitarian, and unmistakably Tamil: an ancestor who binds rather than divides, a leader who consoles rather than dominates, a protector whose vel makes space for people to gather.Hierarchy prefers gods that freeze rank. This Murugan does the opposite. He works like a civic resource, a shared idea, a language of protection that makes plural life feel normal. Outrage cycles may continue. But the songs people actually sing carry a quieter strength: Tamil as the language of devotion, prasadam as a shared good, leadership as care, and coexistence as routine. As long as Murugan is sung this way, enclosure will remain difficult. The vel here is not a border-making weapon. It clears fear, making room for people to gather, share, and feel that spaces belong to all.Vignesh Karthik K.R. is a postdoctoral research affiliate in Indian and Indonesian politics at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies, Leiden and a research affiliate at King’s India Institute, King’s College London. Jeyannathann Karunanithi is an independent researcher based in Chennai.