Palani ( in Tamil) is a city and a municipality in the Dindigul district of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, located about 100km South-east of Coimbatore City and 60km west of Dindigul. It is the location of the far-famed temple of the god Kartikeya, resorted to by more than 7 million devotees each year. The town derives its name from the compounding of two Tamil words pazham, meaning fruit, and nee, you, hearking back to the legend of the chief temple. Palani is pronounced using the retroflex approximant L () of Tamil and may thus also be spelt as "Pazhani" in English. References exist to the place in ancient Tamil devotional texts. A local tradition holds that a velir chieftain named Bayhun (- ), once came upon a peacock in the forests shivering in the cold and chose to cover it using his own upper garment and face the cold, rather than let it die. Although the legend may be apocryphal, it reveals some interesting facts - that the people of...
