South India and her Muhammadan Invaders c13.s1.25

Language: English

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said to have been ruling in great happiness¹ at his ancestral capital. This rebuilding of the capital by the Hoysala exhibits the Hindu rulers of the South taking advantage of the confusion that prevailed at head-quarters before Mubarak made his position secure on the throne at Delhi. We do not hear much of Vīra Baḷḷāḷa III from inscriptional sources till A.D. 1328-29, the year in which Muhammad-bin-Tughlak sent an invasion to the south after his own abortive expedition to Warangal. In spite of the re-building of his capital, the Hoysala does not figure either in the organization of the Mahratta country by Mubarak and the placing of Muhammadan garrisons in the various forts along the Hoysala frontier; or in the subsequent invasions of the Ma'bar (Tamil country) by Khusru Khan. He probably was able to reorganize his resources quietly and unobserved. It was possibly about this time that he went farther afield from Dvārasamudra and laid the foundations of the city generally called Hosapaṭṭaṇa or Virūpākṣapaṭṭaṇa, which ultimately became Vijayanagar, to secure his northern frontier. In the year A.D. 1328-29,² we hear of Vīra Baḷḷāḷa for the first time at Uṇṇamulai Paṭṭaṇam (Tiruvaṇṇāmalai).³ He was ruling in peace and happiness at the same place in A.D. 1342. In the meanwhile one record of his states that in A.D. 1339 (Śaka 1261) he was ruling in happiness in Śrī Vīra Vijaya Virūpākṣapura⁴ as his residential capital (Neḷēvīḍu).

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He is further described in this record as the sole monarch by his own valour.⁵ In the following year a grant refers to the ‘ Paṭṭābhiṣheka (anointment) of the prince’ while Vīra Baḷḷāḷa was ruling.¹ This is apparently a reference to the coronation of the prince which, according to a Chikkamagaḷūr inscription, is said to have taken place at Hosapaṭṭaṇa. There is an inscription in the temple at Hampi referring itself to the Hoysalas, ² indicating thereby that Hampi was in the territory of the Hoysalas. There is further an inscription of A.D. 1354 (Śaka 1276) which states that Bukka was ruling from Hosapaṭṭaṇa. The next year he is said to be in Vidyānagara his capital. This series of facts would put it beyond doubt that Hosapaṭṭaṇa and Vidyānagara are the same Vīrupakshapaṭṭaṇa or Hampi, and that this had been recently fortified against eventualities sometime in or before A.D. 1339 ³ by the Hoysala Vīra Baḷḷāḷa III himself. It is clearly stated in another record of Bukka that it is after the conquest of all the kingdoms that Bukka changed the name of his capital city to Vijayanagar.⁴ It would be a safe inference therefore to make from this sequence of facts that Vīra Baḷḷāḷa III was apparently preparing himself for possible campaigns both on the northern frontier and on the southern, and had his son anointed against eventualities, though this could only have meant the anointment of the prince in the Yauva Rajya (heir-apparency) as Vīra Baḷḷāḷa is definitely stated to be ruling.

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The next year a record from Mālūr gives Vīra Baḷḷāḷa his full titles, and among them is one which ascribes to him the setting up of a pillar of victory at the beginning of ‘the bridge’ at Rāmēśvaram (Sētu Mūla Jayastambha).⁵ This would be of date A.D. 1342 (April-May). The next year (the Śaka year) he is said to be fighting at Trichinopoly against the Muhammadans. This statement is found clearly enough in a viragal (hero-stone) at a village in the Kaḍūr district. It was a stone set up in honour of a gauḍa (a rural magnate) Kankayya who fell in battle with the Muhammadans ‘and went to heaven along with the king.’ The stone was in fact set up in Śaka 1290 in the year Plavanga, but the actual occurrence of the death, referred to in the record,¹ is stated to have taken place (twenty-five years earlier) in the year Chitrabhānu preceding, Āśvyūja Śu. 8 (a date corresponding to A.D. 8th September 1342). But the most important point in the reading of this inscription is the place. I have been able to examine the inscription through the kindness of Rao Bahadur R. Narasimhachariar, Director of Archæological Researches in Mysore, and the reading is Chirichirapaḷi. It is only the latter ‘ra’ that is worn in the first half, but there is little doubt that it is ‘ra’.

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The whole word therefore is Kannaḍa pronunciation of Trichinopoly, which must be the locality of the battle in which Vīra Ballāḷa III fell.² We have a more or less circumstantial account of this transaction from Ibn Batuta, who was in the country at the time, and was in Madura soon after. The battle took place apparently as was stated already between Gyathu-d-din, the Sultan of Madura and a relative of Ibn Batuta, and Vīra Ballāḷa III. But Ibn Batuta calls the place of battle Cobban, the nearest South Indian equivalent of which could be only Koppam. With this particular record of Vīra Ballāḷa before us we must of necessity look out for a Koppam of some strategical importance to have become the scene of such constant wars between the Muhammadans and the Hoysalas. Luckily for us we have a reference to a Koppam in an inscription of Jaṭāvarman Sundara Pāṇḍya I. In the preamble to this inscription¹ he refers to the place Kaṇṇanūr as Kaṇṇanūr-Koppam. And this is obviously the Koppam, or Cobban of Ibn Batuta. In connection with this identificaton it must be borne in mind that according to the account of this Muhammadan traveller who certainly did know what he was describing, this Cobban was a place of vital strategical importance; for, according to him, if Cobban fell the position of the Muhammadans in Madura, would have become impossible. To this description Kaṇṇanūr would answer very well.

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That Kaṇṇanūr passed into the possession of the Muhammadans either during the invasion of Malik Kafur himself, or in the interval between that and this last battle is clear as the place which was the capital of Vīra Rāmanātha, and perhaps even his son, to the time of accession of Vīra Ballāḷa III, does not find mention in any of the records of this Vīra Ballāḷa. The change of capital to Tiruvaṇṇāmalai in A.D. 1328 as we know it, it might have been much earlier, finds an explanation in this that Kaṇṇanūr must have been lost to the Hoysalas before that period and must have become the base of active operations against the Hoysala territory in the Tamil country. It is as a counter-work to the Muhammadan position in Kaṇṇanūr which is on the trunk road leading from the north to Madura that Tiruvaṇṇāmalai must have been pitched upon as the capital of the Hoysalas. Tiruvaṇṇāmalai connects with the Hoysala capitals Kundāṇi and Dvārasamudra, on the one hand, and with Kaṇṇanur on the other, and is certainly well situated for preventing reinforcements reaching the Muhammadans from the north.

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The distance between Trichinopoly and Kaṇṇanūr is only about eight or nine miles at the best, and if anything like a large army of 1,00,000 operated on the side of the Hoysalas, as Ibn Batuta clearly states that that was the strength of the army, this distance between the two camps would be even necessary.¹ The town Trichinopoly is referred to by that name, although not yet found in inscriptional records, in the Tēvāram of Sambandar in the seventh century A.D. and is referred to as the head-quarters of a small division, Tiruchirāppaḷḷi Uśāvaḍi,² under Dēvarāya I in the fifteenth century. There is the probability that the place is referred to by this name in the fourteenth century in a Puḍukoṭṭa Inscription of the eighth year of Tribhuvanachakravartin Parākrama Pāṇḍya which contains a signature Tiruchirāppaḷḷi Uḍaiyān. Hence it is clear that the Cobban of Ibn Batuta is no other than Kaṇṇanūr, and it is in that vicinity that the last battle of Vīra Baḷḷāḷa III was fought.