The epic follows three siblings (twin brothers Ponnar and Sankar and their sister Tangal), who are born to a lineage carrying an old insult and who grow up to reclaim land, status, and honor before dying in battle against rival clans and a goddess-aided boar hunt. Their deaths and the sister's self-sacrifice are presented as the fulfillment of a destiny set in motion generations earlier, after which they are deified and worshipped locally.
In this tradition, human protagonists who die violently or sacrificially in defense of lineage honor are not simply mourned but transformed into worshipped deities with their own shrines and festivals. The epic itself functions as liturgy: its performance is a devotional act that sustains the cult of the deified heroes.
The narrative's conflicts are organized around the social position of a specific agricultural community and its disputes with rival groups over land, marriage alliances, and ranking. The epic encodes and justifies these local caste and kinship relations, so its dramatic stakes are inseparable from the actual social structure of the region where it is sung.