South India and her Muhammadan Invaders c13.s1.66

c13.s1.66

7. Fittan.—This name which appears in the accounts of the Muhammadan historians has not so far been satisfactorily identified. The equivalent of this is Paṭṭaṇam, the Tamil word. Wassaf’s Fittan, Mali Fattan and Kabil must be held to stand for Paṭṭaṇam, Mēlapaṭṭaṇam and Kāyalpaṭṭaṇam. Reading Wassaf with Ibn Batuta we have to take it that the Fittan or Fattan was the port of Madura from which people embarked on their voyages elsewhere, and in which normally they would disembark for getting into the country. If that is the normal port of entry in those days, there is no reason why we should regard Marco Polo to have actually landed elsewhere. One reason that has been urged by Sir Henry Yule in his edition of Marco Polo (Vol. ii, p. 335) is that Polo refers to the place of his landing as in the country of Soli, a province of Sundara Pāṇḍya. In the eighties and nineties of the thirteenth century when Marco Polo visited India, a considerable part, nay even the whole of the Chola country was under Pāṇḍyan authority. If he landed in the territory of Sundara Pāṇḍya, the third of the name in that particular period he might well have regarded himself as having landed in the Chola country because he was governor by pre-eminence of the Chola territory. It would be hardly necessary, because of this particular difficulty, to look for Fittan anywhere in the Chola country, and to equate it with Kaveripatam which does not find any mention in any of the records of the period. No doubt Negapatam, particularly Nagūr (Nagore), was in this period a port of some consequence and enjoyed a considerable amount of trade with the outside world. The deciding factor ought to be that Sultan Ghiyathuddin of Madura asked Ibn Batuta to await his return to Fattan, ordered the equipment of a fleet to carry Ibn Batuta on his invasion of the Maldives from Fattan, and, when Ibn Batuta insisted upon going away in the reign of his successor, he was sent forward to Fattan to be provided with such ships as were available for his voyage to the West Coast. The whole indication of this is that Paṭṭaṇam or port was easily and ordinarily reached from Madura, and if, according to Yule, a mediæval map of about that period marked Dēviapaṭṭiṇam as Mali Fattan, it admits of no doubt that the Fattan must be where perhaps the present day Marakāyarpaṭṭaṇam is. That Dēviya Paṭṭaṇam was in that period a place of consequence can perhaps be inferred from the fact that the Ceylon general marched towards it soon after fortifying Kuṇḍugāl and took that port. Hence Paṭṭaṇam was in all probability the locality now known as Marakāyarpaṭṭaṇam with the possible alternative of Rāmēśvarapaṭṭaṇam, which then must have been in the peninsula not on an island as it is at present.