Iconography · Civilisational Standard · Non-violent

நடுகல் புலி

The Watching Tiger of the Hero-Stone

The land remembers. The tiger watches. The flame does not go out.

Reference standard · anime-realism register · Chola guardian-tiger posture · drawn from Brihadeeswarar temple iconography (1010 CE) and Sangam naṭukal tradition. No proscribed insignia.

VS-ICON-PULIKODI-001

Tradition I

The Hero-Stone

நடுகல்

Sangam-era memorial stones, c. 300 BCE onward. Erected by villages for any person who fell protecting the community — pastoralist, mother, kin. The original Tamil practice of remembrance, documented in Puṟanāṉūṟu and excavated across Tamil Nadu and the north-east.

Tradition II

The Watching Tiger

காவல் புலி

The Chola tiger is the imperial standard of one of the world's longest-ruling Tamil dynasties (c. 850–1279 CE). Here drawn in the seated guardian (yāḷi) posture from Brihadeeswarar temple, Thanjavur — eyes open, paws together, mouth closed. Memory, not war.

Tradition III

The Flame

தீபம்

The Karthigai deepam — oldest Tamil festival lamp, lit for the departed and the living. The flame says: the line of continuity was not broken; what was kept alive is still alive.

What this standard explicitly refuses

The roaring-tiger-head composite designed for the LTTE in 1977 (Natarajan of Madurai).
The crossed rifles, bayonets, encircling bullet-ring, and "Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam" wordmark.
Red field arranged in the LTTE flag composition. This standard uses ochre / gold / palmyra-green, not LTTE crimson-and-yellow.
Uniforms, rank tabs, salutes, drill — any combatant framing of the tiger.
Any depiction of the tiger as attacking, snarling, or weaponised. This tiger sits and watches.
Naming of any individual combatant of a proscribed organisation alongside the standard.

UK Terrorism Act 2000 s.13 prohibits arousing reasonable suspicion of LTTE support through display of LTTE iconography. It does not — and cannot — prohibit the Chola Puli Koḍi, the Sangam hero-stone tradition, the Karthigai flame, or the palmyra. These are documented Tamil civilisational symbols pre-dating the LTTE by roughly 1,100 years (Chola coinage), 2,300 years (Sangam corpus), and immemorially (palmyra).

The மூவேந்தர் triad — context

Classical Tamil polity recognised three crowned dynasties: Chola (புலி · tiger), Pandya (மீன் · twin-fish), and Chera (வில் · bow). Together they are the mūvēndar. The tiger never stood alone in Tamil civilisational memory — it stood beside the fish and the bow, in a constellation of polities, not a single combatant flag. Naṭukal Puli inherits the tiger from that constellation, not from 1977.

Scholarly anchors

Tier A
The Cōḷas (2 vols)
K.A. Nilakanta Sastri · University of Madras · 1935 / rev. 1955
Tier A
Art of the Imperial Cholas
Vidya Dehejia · Columbia University Press · 1990
Tier A
The Poems of Ancient Tamil: Their Milieu and Their Sanskrit Counterparts
George L. Hart · University of California Press · 1975
Tier A
The Four Hundred Songs of War and Wisdom: An Anthology from the Puṟanāṉūṟu
G. Hart & H. Heifetz · Columbia University Press · 1999
Tier A
The Smile of Murugan: On Tamil Literature of South India
Kamil Zvelebil · Brill · 1973
Tier A
Tamil Literature (HOS II.1)
Kamil Zvelebil · Brill · 1975
Tier A
The Coinage and History of South India, vol. II (Chola catalogue, Govt. Museum Chennai)
Michael Mitchiner · Hawkins Publications · 1998
Tier A
Early Tamil Epigraphy
Iravatham Mahadevan · Harvard Oriental Series · 2003
Tier A
Memorial Stones: A Study of their Origin, Significance and Variety (naṭukal tradition)
S. Settar & G.D. Sontheimer (eds) · IGNCA / South Asia Institute Heidelberg · 1982
Tier A
Hero Stones and the Cult of the Hero in Tamil Nadu
K. Rajan · Indian Archaeological Society, Studies in History · 2000
Tier A
The Brihadisvara Temple at Tanjavur (UNESCO World Heritage; Chola murals & guardian-tiger reliefs)
UNESCO World Heritage Centre · Inscribed 1987 / extended 2004
Tier B
Counterpoint: Essays in Archaeology and Heritage Studies — Chola coin tiger emblem
R. Champakalakshmi · IGNCA · 2011
Tier B
Tamil sub-nationalist symbols: a historical analysis
N. Manoharan · Institute of Peace & Conflict Studies · 2007

A note on the LTTE flag (1977)

The flag designed for the LTTE in 1977 by Natarajan of Madurai is a 20th-century military emblem that appropriated the older Chola tiger and recomposed it with rifles, bayonets, and bullets. It is proscribed in the United Kingdom under the Terrorism Act 2000 (Schedule 2) and Veli Studies will never depict, stylise, reinterpret, or partially reproduce it on any public surface. Reclaiming the Chola Puli Koḍi is the opposite movement: it returns the tiger to its civilisational ground and refuses the rifles.

Five Refusals · permanent law · non-removable

1.
No proscribed iconography
No LTTE flag, no LTTE composite emblem (roaring tiger head + crossed rifles + bayonets + bullet ring), no LTTE wordmark, no uniform insignia, no rank tabs, no martyr-cult framing. The Chola Puli Koḍi (c. 9th–13th c. CE), Sangam-era tiger imagery, hero-stone (naṭukal) tradition, and the mūvēndar triad (tiger · fish · bow) are civilisational symbols that pre-date the LTTE by ~1,100 years and are permitted — see /veli-studies/iconography/puli-kodi.
Anchor · UK Terrorism Act 2000 s.13 + s.12; Pwr v DPP [2022] UKSC 2 (strict liability). Carve-out: pre-1976 civilisational iconography documented in Tier-A scholarship.
2.
No randomised atrocity draws
Atrocity events appear only in fixed, curated, cited study sequences — never in a randomised, gamified, or 'pack-pull' context on any public surface.
Anchor · ECHR Art. 8 dignity; OHCHR trauma-informed-documentation guidance.
3.
No cash-out, no wagering
Min stays a non-tradable contribution marker. No secondary market is endorsed. No chance-for-prize loop is ever published.
Anchor · Gambling Act 2005 s.6; FCA PERG 2.7.
4.
No naming proscribed combatants on plates
Combatants appear only as Archetypes & Offices anchored to Tier-A citations. Real names are retained only for non-violent figures — clerics, journalists, lawyers, doctors, mothers of the disappeared — with full citation.
Anchor · UK Terrorism Act 2000 s.13 (strict liability for support); ICCPR Art. 19 protected speech.
5.
Sealed operational layer
No rules text, stat blocks, deck-builder, pack art, or marketplace appears on any public route. The operational layer is sealed in Vault RB-13 behind Founder + 4-of-7 trustee unwrap.
Anchor · TLTE Continuity Charter — Sealed Surface Doctrine.

Amendable only by the Continuity Council (unanimous) + Founder, with public publication within 30 days.

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