South India and her Muhammadan Invaders c11.s1.23

c11.s1.23

Dvārasamudra re-built before A.D. 1316.—The kingdom of the Hoysalas of Dvārasamudra remained quite intact all this while, and was not much affected even by the progress of the Kēraḷa ruler Ravivarman Kulaśēkhara. During the period of activity of the latter in the Tamil country, the Hoysala apparently withdrew into his ancestral dominions and appears to have been attending to the work of restoring order in his kingdom, which had suffered by the invasion of the Muḥammadans considerably, though not to the extent that the Tamil kingdoms did. Reference was already made to the return of the Hoysala prince from Delhi in A.D. 1313,¹ and to the fact that the entry of the prince again into the capital of his father was celebrated by a grant to a temple which might be just one of the items of celebration, and need hardly be regarded as the whole of it. Another record of Vira Baḷḷāḷa III dated the equivalent of A.D. 1316, states in clear terms that the Baḷḷāḷa was ruling in great happiness *after having re-built his capital at Dhorasamudra*.² This rebuilding of the capital is a certain indication of the reviving security of the Hoysala, and we might see a reflex of the disturbances at head-quarters in the hopefulness with which the southern governments went about setting their own kingdoms in order with a view to further eventualities. We do not hear of any activity on the part of the Hoysala in the Tamil country till about the year A.D. 1328. Absence of information is not always synonymous with absence of occurrences worth recording in history; but at the same time it looks as if the Hoysala intervention, which might well have begun soon after A.D. 1316, became really effective only about the year A.D. 1328, the date of the recorded residence of the Hoysala at Tiruvaṇṇāmalai.³ That incident will come in its proper place later. The sudden retirement of Ravivarman Kulaśēkhara might have been due in part at any rate to the attempt of the Hoysala, to recover his lost dominions in the Tamil country¹ though the chief cause must have been the southward march of Pratāpa Rudra’s general Muppiḍināyaka whose records we find both in Kāñchi and Jambukēśvaram (on the island of Śrīrangam, near Trichinopoly). The need therefore for a fresh attempt at the conquest of the southern kingdoms as soon as Mubarak felt settled upon the throne is very clear.