History of the Pallavas of Kanchi c5.10

Language: English

c5.10.1

Any reasonable investigation of this particular question requires a general idea of the whole position. Without assuming too much, we may take it that these are known facts in regard to the Pallavas. The first, according to generally accepted opinion, is that the earliest of them issued charters in Prakrit much in the style of the Sātavāhana charters, of which we have knowledge of the localities concerned. Three or four generations of these Pallavas happen to be known. The Allahabad Prasasti of Samudragupta makes mention of a Viṣṇugopa of Kanchi. Without pausing to enquire whether this Viṣṇugopa was a Pallava or no—there is nothing in the context of the inscription to indicate that he was not a Pallava as no ruler is mentioned by his dynastic name, but all of them are associated with their capitals—Viṣṇugopa must have been a ruler of Kanchi contemporary with Samudragupta. This may be taken to be the second established fact. Then it is that we come upon a confused dark period where more light would certainly be welcome. But soon after, for a couple of hundred years, we find a dynasty of rulers, the order of whose succession, we cannot as yet fix very definitely.

c5.10.2

These rulers for some reason or other issued their charters always in Sanskrit, and called themselves invariably rulers of Kanchi, although some of their charters were issued from various ‘victorious camps’ of which there are as many as three or four capable of location in the Nellore District, that is, the region north of Toṇḍamaṇḍalam proper. With these few main facts, which may be taken as established, we have to build up the history of the period from such glimpses as we get of details by setting them in a reasonable order on the basis of what is generally known. One general fact of Pallava history of this period—the period of the Sanskrit charters—is that it was a period of some amount of confusion, in which the succession to the throne itself could not have been in any very regular established order. There had been wars to the north, and wars to the south, and confusion in the interior of the territory of the Pallavas themselves. That seems to have been a period in which the Kadambas rose to power and the Gangas came into historical view on the one side. The Cholas almost passed into oblivion and the Tamil country suffered some kind of a confusion, as to the nature of which we have been in the dark till the Veḷvikudi plates threw some light upon it by stating categorically that a certain set of rulers, at the head of the people Kaḷabhras, overthrew the Tamil rulers of the south, the famous three crowned kings of Śangam literature.

c5.10.3

What is the cause of all this confusion and what is it that could satisfactorily explain all the facts mentioned above categorically? We have a specific lead in the Veḷvikudi plates for this, namely, that the Kaḷabhras came into the Tamil country as far south as the territory of the Pandyas, and upset the settled order to the extent of destroying a *Brahmadēya* gift (a free gift of land to Brahmans) which in orthodox parlance implies the destruction of a settled order of rule by the creation of a very considerable amount of confusion in the administration. If we could know something of these Kaḷabhras, we may possibly throw some light upon the causes of all the confusion in the history of the Pallavas during the period. For this again, there is a certain amount of light that we can derive from the Veḷvikudi plates themselves. The plates were issued by an individual sovereign, who restored the grant to the living representative of its original donee on satisfactory proof that the village was originally granted in the manner claimed. His father, generally known to epigraphists by the titles Tērmāran Rājasimha, we know, beyond doubt, was a contemporary of Nandivarman Pallavamalla (cir. A.D. 717 to cir. A.D. 782). Alloting him to somewhere about the middle of the long reign of Nandivarman, we may roughly place him in about A.D. 750 or A.D. 740.

c5.10.4

We want six generations to come to the period when the Pandya country emerged from out of the Kaḷabhra rule and got back into Pandya rule, and a certain ruler by name Kaḍumkon is stated in the grant to have done this. Even allowing the moderate span of twenty-five years' rule to each of these six generations, Kaḍumkon's rule would come to somewhere about A.D. 600 more or less, bringing him roughly into contemporaneity with the first great Pallava ruler, Simhavishṇu. The period of the Kaḷabhra interregnum, according to the Vēḷvikuḍi plates thus coincides with the period of Pallava history under the rule of the Pallavas of the Sanskrit charters. If the Kaḷabhras created confusion in the Tamil country, they must have come from elsewhere into it. Wherefrom did they come? It is obvious that they did not come from the south. The Pandya country seems the southern limit of their reach. During the period, Chola rule seems to have gone into eclipse of a more or less thorough character. The natural inference therefore would be that they probably advanced southwards. If they were in the Chola country before coming to the Pandya, could we not reasonably infer that they had been in the Pallava country before coming into the Chola, or at least had something to do with the Pallava? If so, who could these Kaḷabhras be, why were they so-called, and what would be the cause of their southward migration?