South India and her Muhammadan Invaders c8.s1.5

c8.s1.5

His religious policy.—There seems to have been a severe famine in the twenty-third year of his reign, i.e. the first year of the thirteenth century, when the distress was so great that a Veḷḷāḷan (an upper class agriculturist) sold himself and his two daughters for 110 kāśu to the temple. Devoted Śaiva as Kulottunga was, there is a reference in a record of his son to his twenty-second year (i.e. A.D. 1300), which states, according to the Epigraphist, that ‘in the twenty-second year of Periyadēvar, the elder king, there was a general crusade against monasteries of this type (kuhai idikalaham) when all the property of the monastery under reference was confiscated’. The monastery under reference is one at Tirutturaippūṇḍi where a Śaiva devotee, Tiruchchirrambala Mudaliar, came into residence at the request of the inhabitants of the locality, who built a monastery and provided for feeding strangers that might be there on a visit. It is not clear from the record, as published, whether this was due to an act of persecution by the state, or a mere outburst of popular fanaticism. It can hardly be the former, as it is called a ‘kalaham’ an outburst or a riot, and as the devotee continued there apparently till his death two years after. In his twenty-fourth year Kulottunga III made a grant for the worship of the Nāyanmārs (the sixty-three Śaiva devotees) according to No. 506 of the Epigraphists’ collection for the year 1912. Again according to No. 466 of the same collection they suffered a paḷḷichchandam (a Jain temple) in the locality. It is not safe to infer from this with the epigraphists, that the kuhai idikalaham, which happened in the twenty-second year of Periyadēvar (i.e. Kulottunga III) ‘must have been instigated by the Brahmans against the non-Brahmanical Śaiva maṭhas.’ Such a general persecution is the more unlikely as we have reference to the prosperous existence of four of these non-Brahman monasteries in the reign of Rājarāja III, the successor of Kulottunga III.