South India and her Muhammadan Invaders c13.s1.21

c13.s1.21

Muhammadan dynasties of Madura.—The dynasty of the Sultans of Madura which flourished in the period of A.D. 1335 to A.D. 1378, a period of about forty-five years, has been confounded with the incorrect succession list given by Nelson in the manual of the Madura country, and adopted therefrom by Mr. Sewell in his Antiquities of the Madras Presidency, volume ii. Quite recent reports of the Epigraphist to the Madras Government adopt the same scheme also.¹ An examination of the list given both in Nelson and Sewell shows that the dynasty began with Ādi Sultan Malik Nēmi on the authority of the Mackenzie manuscripts—one of those documents based on the local accounts obtained and recorded by Colonel Mackenzie’s staff early in the nineteenth century. Of the six names that follow, it is possible to identify two or three with the Sultans of the coins of Madura whose history I have detailed above. The last three or four names seem not possible to recover or to equate satisfactorily. Adopting this list from Sewell, the Muhammadan dynasty is made to begin in A.D. 1310 and come to an end forty-eight years after, in A.D. 1358. This arrangement, it is hardly necessary to point out, is untenable since the discovery of the coins of Madura and their study. No Muhammadan dynasty of Madura could be held to begin earlier than A.D. 1335² and the dynasty lasted till A.D. 1378 according to these coins with a rather wide gap from A.D. 1345 to 1357. Further criticism of Nelson’s list would be superfluous.