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PRE HISTORIC PEOPLES

Palaeolithic man
Palaeolithic or neolithic man, practically no traces have as yet been found in the Madura district. Mr. Bruce-Foote says that associated with the shingle which is mixed with the ferruginous gravel to the north of the tank of Tallakulam Village (Opposite Madura town, across the Vaigai river) occur occasional flakes of different coloured cherts of foreign origin, some of which seem certainly to have been trimmed for use as scrapers or knives. He thinks further search would probably reveal unquestionably recognizable specimens of chipped stone instruments, but as yet none seem to have been discovered.

Kistvaens, etc.
Of the existence of those prehistoric peoples who buried their dead in stone kistvaens and dolmens there is, however, abundant evidence. Instances of these erections are reported from places as widely separated as Kaittiyankottai and its next nieghbour Kalvarpatti in the north of the Dindigul taluk; Ragalapuram and Viralippatti, not far form one another to the southeast of Dindigul town; Mullipallam in Nilakkottai taluk; Karungalakudi in Melur; Kalayamuttur, Chinna Kalayamuttur (those at the two latter places are regularly worshipped by the villagers) and palni in palni taluk; and Kambam and Margaiyankottai in periyakulam. Pyriform earthen tombs have also been found near Kulasekharankottai in Nilakkottai taluk, paravi and Anuppanadi in Madura, and Senkulam in Tirumangalam. Some of these many remains are referred to again in chapter XV below, and in the same place are mentioned the most striking of all the prehistoric antiquities of the district, the kistvaens and dolmens of the palni Hills.

When times which may be styled historical are first reached, the greater part of the Madura country is found to be in the possession of the pandya dynasty, and the early chronicles of the district are to a large extent the history of that line.

The Pandya dynasty
These pandyas were the rulers of one of three great kingdoms which in the earliest times held sway over the land of the Tamils. Tradition, inscriptions and ancient literature all agree in beginning the history of south India with the story of the three dynasties of the Cheras, the Cholas and the pandyas, whose eponymous ancestors are fabled to have been three brothers who resided together at Korkai, near the mouth of the Tambraparni river in the Tirunevely country. They are said to have eventually separated, pandyan remaining at home, while cheran and cholan went forth to seek their fortunes and founded kingdoms in the north and the west respectively. Tradition, which is supported by such history as exists, states that the cholas ruled in the country which now forms the Tanjore and Trichirapally districts,the Cheras in Travancore, Malabar and Coimbatore, and the pandyas in Madura and Tinnevelly.

Its antiquity
The pandya kingdom can boast a respectable antiquity and is referred to by the classical writers of Greece and Rome. Megasthenes (Who was sent as ambassador by seleucus Nicator, one of Alexander the Great’s Successors, to the court of Chandra Gupta, King of pataliputra near patna, about 302 B.C) Speaks of a country called pandaia after the name of the only daughter of ‘the Indian Hercules’ or Krishna. To this only daughter pandaia, says Megasthenes, Krishna ‘assigned that portion of India which lies to the south ward and extends to the sea’. Pliny (AD.77) mentions the pandae, king pandion and the latter’s mediterranean emporium of Modoura. That be pandyas at this period occupied no mean political position is to be inferred from Dr. Caldwell’s belief that it way they who sent to the Roman emperor Augustus the Indian embassy mentioned by Strabo (A.D. 20). Ptolemy (A.D. 140) mentions ‘Madura the kingdom of the pandion.’ So many Roman coins have been found in and around Madura that it has been suggested2 that a Roman colony must once have existed there.

An interesting reference to the pandyas is also found in an inscription of Asoka,3 the emperor of the north. who came to the throne in 269 B.C. and prosecuted extensive conquests in central India. This contains the boast that ‘the conquest through the sacred law extended in the south where the chodas (Cholas) and the panidas (Pandyas) dwell, as fer as Tambapanini, (the Tambraparni). This ‘conquest’was clearly not a subjugation by force of arms, and the phrase probably means little more than that the pandyas and cholas permitted the preaching of the Buddhist religion. Indeed, until the fourteenth century of the present era the pandyas, the Cheras, and perhaps the Cholas seems to have remained unmolested by the armies of the great empires of the north which from time to time overran the neighbouring country, and their political horizon seems to have been largely limited by their wars among themselves, and their conflicts with neighbouring savage or jungle tribles and with the Singhalese.

Appears in early Tamil Literatur
Early Tamil literature contains many references to the pandya dynasty and country. The late Mr. V.Kanakasabhai pillai in his recent work The Tamils eighteen hundred years ago1, gives a series of extracts from such poems as the purananuru, pattupattu silappadigaram and Manimegalai which not only present a unique and remarkably interesting picture of the state of art, agriculture, Commerce, society and politics during the period when they were written, which Mr. Kanakasabhai places in the first and second centuries of the present ora, but also contain a number of historical facts. The value of these latter is discounted by the uncertainty which must be considered to exist as to the dates of the poems2, and consequently of the events with which they deal, but Mr. Kanakasabhai Pillai has deduced from them the following sequence of five pandya kings, to whom he assigns the dates affixed below to each:- (I) Nedun-Cheliyan I (A.D. 50-75) (2) Verri-ver-cheliyan (75-90), (3) Nedun-Cheliyan II (90-128), (4) Ugra-peru-valuti (128-140) and (5) Nan-maran (140-150).

Of the first of these rulers the poems relate that he bore a title which may be taken to imply that he defeated an Aryan army and say that he died suddenly, while sitting on his throne, in the following dramatic circumstances: He had ordered his guards, says the tale, to behead a man on suspicion that he had stolen one of the queen’s anklets. The man’s wife appeared before him, proved her husbend’s innocence, and taunted the king with his hastiness. In her country, the land of the Cholas, she exclaimed, the kings were of different stuff: One had saved a dove’s life by offering his own flesh to an eagle which pursued the bird, and another and executed his own son for driving his chariot over a calf. Stung with shame at the woman’s taunts and filled with remorse for his injustice,the king fell fainting from his throne and expired shortly afterwards.

The second of the five kings ruled only a short time and was followed by his son. This latter, Nedun-Cheliyan II, was a soldier of much prowess. He repelled a Chola invasion of his kingdom and afterwards carried the war into the enemy’s country and annexed one of their provinces. He was then confronted by a confederacy of the cholas, the cheras and five minor cheiftains, but defeated them in a great battle which raged all day and in which the flower of all the troops of the Tamil country were engaged.

The fourth king, Ugra-peru-valuti, was the monarch at whose court the Kural, the famous sacred poem of Tiruvalluvar, was published in the presence of a brilliant assembly of 48 poets; and the well-known Tamil poetess Auvaiyar composed stanzas in his honour. The poems say that he was friendly with the chera and chola kings, having, been present at a sacrifice performed by one of the latter,and that he took a great fortress belived to be impregnable and called Kanapper, ‘whose high walls seem to reach the sky, whose battlements gleam like the stars, the ditch surrounding which is deep and unfathomable as the sea, and the jungle beyond it so dense that the sun’s rays never penetrate it’.

According to these ancient poems, the capitial of the pandyas was Nan-madak-kudal, ‘the cluster of four towers,’ which is the modern Madura. It was called ‘the Northern madura’ to distinguish it from a previous capital of the same name, in the extreme south of the peninusulla, which had been submerged by the sea1,. Another chief town which had shared the same fate was also on the coast and was called Kapadapuram. Even modern Madura was not always in exactly its present position. The original city seems to have been about six miles to the south-east. No vestige of it remains, but the tradition of its existence is strong and the poet Nakkran speaks of it as being east of Tirupparankunram. It possessed four gates surmounted by high towers, outside its massive stone walls was a deep moat, and surrounding this was a thick jungle of thorny trees. Two of the ‘Ten Tamil Idylls’ (the Nadunal - Vadai by Nakkiran and the Madurai-Kanji of Mamkudi Maratanar, abstracts of which are given in the christian college Magazine, viii, 661 ff.) give most vivid descriptions of the city and its inhabitants in these early days. Korkai in Tinnevelly, which was well known to the writer of the periplus Maris Erythrai (about A.D.80) and to ptolemy, was another important town, and the pandya king is often referred to in ancient Tamil literature (as well as in inscriptions) as Korkaiyali, or ‘the Lord of Korkai.’

The pandya royal emblem was a fish (that of the Cheras was a bow and of the Cholas a tiger) and it appears on their coins2. Their warriors wore garlands of margosa when they went to battle, in contradistinction to the chaplets of ‘ar’ of the cholas and the palmyra leaves of the cheras.

The prevailing religion in early times in their kingdom was the jain creed. The periya puranam, a Tamil work dealing with the lives of the 63 devotees of Siva the veracity of which has been established in several instances, says that the pandya king Nedumaran was converted to saivism from the Jain faith by the famous Saiva saint Tirugnana Sambandhar, who cured him of a faver upon which none of his own priests could make any impression.

Its First mention in inscriptions
Thus far does Tamil literature enlighten the darkness of the early days of the pandyas. A wide unbridged gap follows, and it is not until the end of the sixth century of the present era that any continuous history of the line can be said to begin. Inscriptions then take up the tale.

Its Struggles with pallavas 7th century
About that time the dynasty of the pallavas (whose capital was at Kanchi, the modern Conjeeveram) tried to extend their conquests south wards and fell foul of the Pandyas. Two of their kings, Simhavishnu and his grandson Narasimhavarman I, boast in their inscriptions that they conquered the pandya kingdom.

Decline of the latter
Almost at once, however, pressure from this quarter was relieved by the sudden appearance of a new line of rulers who gave the pallavas sufficient employment in the north to divert their attention from their southern neighbours. These were the Chalukyas of Badami, in the Bombay presidency. By 615 A.D., they had driven the pallavas back to the walls of conjeeveram, and even assert that they conquered the Cholas,1 crossed the Cauvery, and invaded the country of the pandyas and cheras.2 The latter boast is probably an embty one, since there are no traces of Chalukyan conquest in the Chola or pandya country at this period; but a claim which is much more likely to have a foundation in fact, and which is of greater interest for our present purposes, is the statement of the Chalukyan king pulakesin II(A.D. 610-34) that he induced the pandyas, Cholas and cheras to combine and overcome the pallavas.3 He had nothing to gain by recording false statements about the success of this combination, as it was due to no merit of his own.

For the next hundred years nothing certain is known of the doings of the pandyas, but they apparently retained their independence. About 750 A.D. they again came into confirct with the pallavas, for an inscription of Nandivarman pallavamalla, who was probably about the last of the latter dynasty who held any real power, states that his general, Udayachandra, gained a victory over the pandyas at ‘Mannaikkudi.’1But as this place has not been identified it is not possible to say which of the two combatants was the aggressor.

The Ganga, Pallavas, 9th Century
Shortly after this the power of the pallavas declined, and their place was taken, though perhaps not immediately, by the Ganga-pallavas. These latter seem, like their prodecessors, to have had their capital at Conjeeveram; and towards the end of the ninth century they extended their rule for a few years into the north of the Chola country.

Pandya ascedancy
They do not, as far as is yet known, make any claims to victories over the pandyas; and apparently these latter were not only independent, but powerful enough to control the Chola country as well as their own for a considerable part of the ninth century. For there are inscriptions near Tanjore,3 in the heart of the Chola realms, assignable to that century on palaeographic grounds, which relate the acts of pandya kings; a record in North Arcot mentions a victory of the pandyas over the Gangas (a Mysore dynasty who seem at this time to have been feudatories of the Ganga-Pallavas) which occurred about the middle of the same century in the very north of the Chola country, at Tiruppirambiyam near Kumbakonam;4 and the Mahavamsa, the Ceylon Chronicle, says that the pandyas made an entirely unprovoked invasion of Ceylon in the time of king sena I, who reigned from 846 to 866.

Chola revival,  tenth to twelth centuries
Towards the latter part of this ninth century, however, the pandyas must have been forced to retire from at any rate the north of the Chola dominions before the advance of the Ganga-Pallavas; and by the end of it the Cholas, who had been under a temporary eclipse, again rose to power and began to lay the foundations of an empire which contineed supreme in south India, with slight interruptions, for nearly three centuries.

It would seem to have been in the reign of the Chola king Parantaka I (about 906-46) that the pandyas for the first time fell difinitely under the Chola yoke.5 That monarch assumed the title of ‘conqueror of Madura,’ his inscriptions range from Suchindram near Cape Comorin to Kalahasti in North Arcot, and he also invaded Ceylon.

A Chance of a bid for freedom was afforded to pandyas in 949 by the crushing defeat of the Cholas in that year near Arkonam by the Rashtrakutas of Malkhed (in What is now the Nizam’s Dominions) who now occupied the country formenly held by the Chalukyas of Badami. The pandyas seem to have rebelled successfully, and their ruler Vira-pandya defeated the Chola King Aditya Karikala and assumed the title of ‘he who took the head of the Chola.’ But later they again succumbed, for the Chola King Rajaraja I (985-1013) claims to have ‘taken away their splendour,’ and the substantial foundation which existed for his boast and the complete subjection of the pandya country are evidenced by the immense number of Chola inscriptions which occur in the Madura and Tinnevelly district, by the very large number of copper coins of Rajaraja which are even now found in the former of these,1 and by the fact that the name of the old pandya capital of Korkai was changed to the chola term Cholendrasimha - chaturvedimangalam and that of the pandya country itself to Rajaraja-pandi-nadu.2 The pandya realms became, in fact, a province of the Chola empire.

The position of this empire at this period is a matter which belongs rather to the history of Tanjore and Trichinopoly3 than to that of Madura, and it is not necessary to refer to it here in any detail. Rajaraja extended his rule throughout the Madras presidency and in some directions even beyond it: on the west his sway reached as far as Quilon and Coorg; on the north-east to the borders of Orissa;and his conquests included Ceyion and the ‘twelve thousand ancient islands of the sea.’ parts of Burma and the Malay Archipelago were added to these dominions by his immediate successors. Their conquests were least secure in the North-west, and their most formidable rivals at this period were the Western Chalukyas, a branch of the Chalukyas of Badami above referred to, who had outsed the Rashtrakutas of Malkhed and returned to power with their capital at Kalyani, in what is now Haidarabad territory.

Pandya rebellions
At first, in the reigns of Rajaraja (985-1013) and his successor Rajendra Chola I (IOII-33), the pandyas appear to have borne the Chola yoke quietly enough.

During the rule of Rajadhiraja I (1018-53), however, trouble began, the pandyas, the cheras and the Singhalese uniting to throw off the Chola yoke. The revolt was sternly suppressed. The Singhalese king was killed in battle, the Cheraruler captured and put to death, and the pandya chief driven to headlong flight. The victor’s inscription commemorating his triumph1 says that

‘Of the three allied kings of the south he cut off on the battle-field the beautiful head of Manabharanan adorned with great gems and a golden crown; captured in fight Vira-Keralan of the wide ankle rings, and was pleased to have him trampled to death by his furious elephant Attivarana; and drove to the ancient river Mullaiyar Sundara pandya of great and undying fame, who lost in the stress of battle his royal white parasol, his fly-whisks of white yak’s hair and his throne, and fled, leaving his crown behind him, with dishevelled looks and weary feet.’

The records of the next Chola king, Rajendra-Deva (1052-63), do not refer to any trouble with the pandyas, but his successor, Vira-Rajendra I (1062-70) had to put down a fresh rebellion of theirs. He captured the pandya chief and caused him to be ‘trampled to death by a furious mast elephant, and he gave the pandya country to his son Gangai-Konda Chola, Who took the title of Chola-pandya.

The dath of this Vira-Rajendra was followed by a fierce domestic contest for the Chola crown, and it was not apprently till about 1074 that the next king, the great Kulottunga I, who reigned till 1119, succeeded in establishing himself firmly on the throne. His hands must have been too full during these four years to allow him to keep a proper hold upon the outlying portions of his empire, and a great part of them fell into disorder. Ceylon appears to have cut itself adrift and the pandyas and the Cheras again united in rebellion. They were again suppressed. An inscription of the pandyas’ to flight and subdued the Gulf of Manaar, ‘the podiyil mountain’ (Agastyamalai in Tinnevelly), Cape Comorin and Kottaru (now in Travancore), the last of which places country and placed garrisons at Kottaru and other strategically important places within it.

Pandya renaissance, 12th Century
Kings of the Chola-pandya line above mentioned seem to have gone on ruling the pandya country till somewhere about 1136, but the histroy of both the Cholas and the pandyas in the next 35 years is at present obsurce. During that period the dominions of the former seem to have been considerably curtailed, but it is not possible to say exactly what was their position in the pandya country. When at length (in the reign of the Chola king Rajadhiraja II, about 1171-2) inscriptions again begin to throw light upon the relations of the two peoples, a struggle for the pandya throne is found to be proceeding between two pandya princes who seem to have nothing to do with the Chola-pandya line, and the kings of the Cholas and of Ceylon are taking opposite sides in the quarrel. What had happened in the meantime to the Chola-pandya dynasty it is impossible to say.

Struggle for the throne
The two rival claimants to the pandya crown were parakrama-pandya and Kulasekhara-pandya. How they were related, or how the strife arose, is not clear. Chapters 76 and 77 of the singhalese Chronicle Mahavamsa give, however, a fairly detailed, though doubtless one-sided, account of the campaing.

Parakrama was besieged by Kulasekhara in his capital (Madura) and appealed for help to the king of Ceylon. The latter despatched his general Lankapura-Dandanatha with orders to suppress Kulasekhara and establish parakrama on the throne; but before the Singhalese army could embark, Kulasekhara had captured Madura and put his rival, with his queen and some of his children, to death, Lankapura was ordered by his master to proceed none the less, to recover the pandya realms, and to hand them over to some relative of the murdered king. He landed in India accordingly, and for some time his troops carried everything before them. He sent for Vira-Pandya, the youngest son of the dead parakrama (Who had escapted when Madura fell), and set him up as claimant for the throne. Subsequently, with the aid of reinforcements from Ceylon, he inflicted such crushing defeats upon Kulasekhara that the latter fled to ‘Tondamana,’ Which is perhaps the pudukkottai country, and the Singhalese troops occupied Madura town.

It was at this stage that the Cholas seem to have first given Kulasekhara their support. With their help a stand was made at ‘Pon-Amaravati,’ a place not yet identified, but the Singhalese were once more victorious and a space of three leagues was covered with the corpses of the vanquished. Lankapura returned in triumph of Madura placed Vira-pandya on the throne and celebrated the event with a great festival.

Supported by the ruler of Tondamana and certain other Chola chiefs, Kulasekhera again took the field, but was again defeated, this time at Palamcottah, and fled for refuge to the Chola country. The Chola king then assisted him with a large army, but he was yet again vanquished, and the Ceylon troops advanced northwards and even burnt some villages in the Tanjore country. After one more victory over the pandya and Chola troops the Singhalese returned to Ceylon, leaving Vira-pandya in possession of his kingdom.

The war did not end there, however. Inscriptions of the Chola king Kulottunga III show that that ruler subsequently supported Kulasekhara’s Successor Vikrama-pandya in an effort against Vira-pandya and his son, defeated the Marava army, drove the Simhala (Singhalese) forces into the sea, captured Madura, made over the pandya crown to his protege Vikrama and assumed the title of ‘conqueror of Madura and Ceylon’.

Decline of the Cholas, 13th Century
These stirring events occurred somewhere about the end of the twelfth century. ‘Early in the thirteenth, the power of the Cholas began to decline. It was during the reign of Rajaraja III of that dynasty (1216 to about 1239) that the first fatal blows were received. This king’s feudatories revolted on all sides, and one of them, Kopperunjinga, a pilace of some power in Tondaimandalam, the present South Arcot, actually had the impudence to kidnap his suzerain (1230-31) and refuse to release him.1 The unfortunate Rajaraja was only rescued by the intervention of the Hoysala Ballalas, a newly-risen dynasty which had recently subverted the Western Chalukyas of Kalyani and established their capital at Halebid in Mysore.