South India and her Muhammadan Invaders c11.22

c11.22

Pandharpur seems to have been then a frontier station between the Mahratta country and the Karnāṭa of the Hoysalas. It was already pointed out that an inscription of Vīra Somēśvara has recently been discovered there, which perhaps marks it as the northern-most limit of the Hoysala dominions. The road thence to Dvārasamudra seems to have followed either of the two well-known roads, but probably the eastern road from Pandharpur to Bijapur, from Bijapur to Harihar; from Harihar to Hiriyūr and thence across from the main road to Bāṇavar and Haḷebīḍ a possible and fairly convenient route of march even now. That fixes the route of march of Malik Kafur to Dvārasamudra. The route thence is not equally simple. According to Amir Khusru they marched five days to get to the mountains; that means, the distance from Haḷebīḍ to Hosur, was a five days' march. The road taken must surely have been not the road from Haḷebīḍ by way of Mysore down the Satiyamangalam ghat into the Coimbatore district. It appears to be the eastern road that was taken; therefore the army must have come back to Bāṇavar; from there they must have struck the main road somewhere about Chikkanāyakanhalli, and thence by way of Tumkur and Bangalore to Hosur. Of the two passes mentioned, there is nothing satisfactorily answering to the Sarmali of Amir Khusru. From the way that he mentions the two, we have to look for both of them close to each other among the passes that lead from the Mysore plateau into the country below the ghats. One of the passes leads through the Mēlagiri hills, and that does not bring the Mēlagiris near in sound to Sarmali. The whole country on this side was known in those days as Puramalai Nāḍu, the country outside the hills. It is not certain whether something like that is not the cause of the confusion. But the other pass that he actually does mention as ‘Tabar’ is the pass on the main road, now commonly known as the Toppur Pass, well-known also in the campaigns of early British India. Getting across the mountains by the Toppur pass, the army reached the river ‘Kanobari,’ apparently Kaveri, and then bivouacked for the night on the sands. It is not clearly inferable from his account whether the army actually crossed the Kaveri and took the road on the right bank, or whether it pursued its way by the road on the eastern bank of the river. As apparently the Kaveri did not contain much water, they might have crossed the Kaveri and taken the western road till they came to Muśiri, where the main road gets across the Kaveri to the other side and joins the Namkal road. The objective of the march all along is said to have been the ‘country of Bir’ or what seems a city or town under the name ‘Birdhul.’ Since there is no mention in the narrative of the second crossing of the Kaveri, it is just possible the route taken was the other; from Toppur to Omalur and thence to Salem by Tiruchen-gode; from there to Namakal and down on the high road to Kaṇṇanūr and Śrīrangam by the left bank of the Kaveri itself. Whichever of the routes was taken it is clear that the road taken was the well-beaten road from above the ghats to Trichinopoly, the route taken by Hoysala Narasimha when he intervened effectively against the Pāṇḍya invasion of the Chola country, as I have already pointed out in the previous lectures. The campaign in this region hovered round the Chola capital, Gangaikondaśolapuram and the Hoysala capital of Kaṇṇanūr (Sanskrit, Khaṇḍanapura, and Kandur of the Muhammadan historians); Chidambaram, Śrīrangam and various other temples suffered.