History of the Pallavas of Kanchi c5.11

c5.11

We have stated above on the authority of the Prakrit charters that the so-called Pallavas were viceroys of the south-eastern marches of the Andhra country, and they gradually extended their territory so as to occupy the region dominated by the hill Vēṅgaḍam, and ruled over by tribal chieftains, the earlier one known to literature being Tiraiyan of Pavattiri and the later one Pulli of Vēṅgaḍam. The latter chief is generally spoken of as the chief of the Kaḷvar in the so-called Śangam literature. But the learned editor of these works has since discovered that the correcter reading, on manuscript authority, would be Kaḷavar and not Kaḷvar. In the region which they occupied in the period of the later Sātavāhanas, and therefore the period immediately preceding that of the Pallavas, they had been a set of frontier people, at least somewhat predatory in point of character, accustomed to lifting cattle from the northern frontier and thereby flourishing upon it as a profession, and that is how Pulli is described in the Śangam literature. The tightening of the hold of the Pallavas even as viceroys of the Andhras by a pressure applied both from the north and west, must have dislodged these people from the locality of their denizenship, and set forward their migration which ultimately overturned the Toṇḍamaṇḍalam first, Choḷamaṇḍalam next, and a considerable part of the Pāṇḍyamaṇḍalam after that. Perhaps it is this disturbance, and possibly the confusion caused by the invasion of Samudragupta through some of these regions, that must have ultimately brought about the subversion of the settled order and the introduction of the confusion, from out of which emerged the Pallavas of Kanchi of the Sanskrit charters. That period, it will be found, is the period in which something of a radical change had been taking place in the south-western viceroyalty—the palatine viceroyalty of the Andhras—of Banavasi. We see in that region, a set of rulers who called themselves Chūṭu Nāgas, claim relationship with the ruling family of the Sātavāhanas and achieving political distinction by wars against the Śakas and the Kshatrapas, the enemies of the great Sātavāhana, Gautamīputra Sātakarṇi. In the best days of their power, their territory seems to have extended as far north as the Godavari, but it began to shrink on the northern side, so that they became a purely southern power. The illuminating detail that the Vēlūrpāḷayam plates give us of Virakūrcha becoming, heir to a kingdom by a marriage with a wife, by which, as is stated in the quaint language of the charter, ‘he simultaneously obtained a wife and a kingdom.’ This seems to be no more than his marrying the heiress of the Chūṭu Nāgas and, by securing a wife of that distinction, he became also the heir to that territory either in his own person, or, possibly better, in that of his son. It is this alone that can account for the very important historical fact that we know of in the history of the Pallavas later,—the acknowledgment of allegiance to the Pallavas by the Gangas, two successive rulers of the Gangas having been installed on their hereditary throne by the contemporary Pallavas. That seems to be the position also in regard to the Kadambas, who became heir to the territory of the Chūṭu Nāgas clearly by conquest, as the story of Mayūraśarman indicates.