South India and her Muhammadan Invaders c9.65

c9.65

It is this Kulaśēkhara that is referred to in chapter 90 of the Mahāvaṁśa of Ceylon.¹ In recording the history of Parākrama Bāhu III, who ruled from A.D. 1288 to 1293 according to this authority, there is a reference made to a famine in Ceylon and to an invasion of the island by the Tamils. It is just in the years immediately preceding, that the predecessor of this Parākrama Bāhu, by name Bhuvanēka Bāhu, drove away from Ceylon ‘all his Tamil foes, as Kāḷinga Rāyar, Choḍaganga, and the others who had landed from the opposite coast, and also removed the Singhalese Vannian princes Kadalivata, Mapana, Tipa, Himayanaka and others.’ After a few years of pious effort to make the teachings of the Buddha spread through the island by getting copies of the ‘three Piṭakas’ made and placing them in every monastery in the island, he died and was succeeded by his nephew Parākrama Bāhu. It was then that there arose a famine in the land, ‘then the five brethren who governed the Pāṇḍyan Kingdom, sent to this island at the head of an army, a great minister of much power, who was chief among the Tamils known as Āriya Chakravarti, albeit he was not an Āriya.²