- About thirty miles south of Madurai is a village — Tiruchuli by name — with an ancient Siva temple about which two great Tamil saints, Sundaramurti and Manikkavacakar, have sung.
- In this sacred village there lived in the latter part of the nineteenth century an uncertified pleader, Sundaram Aiyar with his wife Alagammal. Piety, devotion and charity characterised this ideal couple.
- Sundaram Aiyar was generous even beyond his means. Alagammal was an ideal Hindu wife.
- On the 30th of December 1879, to them was born Venkataraman — who later came to be known to the world as Ramana Maharshi.