History of the Pallavas of Kanchi c5.3

c5.3

The name Pallavas has been a problem for scholars, and has received attention from time to time from several of them, offering explanations of various kinds; the doubt and the difficulty alike have arisen from the fact that a race of people called ‘Pahlavas’ were known and are referred to as such along with the Sakas and others, both in the North-west of India and nearer in the North-western coast of the Dakhan. This, in literary texts sometimes takes the alternative form ‘Pallava’, and thus two forms, ‘Pahlava’ and ‘Pallava’ occurring side by side, give colour to the assumption that the two words are identical. They are indeed identical in form, but do not preclude the possibility of another word assuming this identical form. The word ‘Pallava’ as it applies to the rulers of Kanchi is undoubtedly and invariably a later form. We do not meet with the form ‘Pahlava’ in connection with the Pallavas of Kanchi in any record of their time. The question therefore would naturally arise whether we need necessarily regard the name ‘Pallavas’ as applied to the rulers of Kanchi as at all equivalent to the other ‘Pallavas’ either as a word or in regard to what the word stands for. The word as applied to ‘Pallavas’ in the first instance seems to be a translation of the Tamil words ‘Toṇḍaiyar’ and ‘Toṇḍamān’, and this finds confirmation in some of the copper-plate charters, which do bring in tender twigs of some kind in connection with the eponymous name ‘Pallava’. This undoubtedly is a later use of the term, but gives the indication that even at that comparatively late period, the traditional notion was that they were not foreigners, such as the Pahlavas would have been. In all the material that has been examined, there is nothing to indicate either the migration of a people or even of a family that migh have ultimately raised itself into a dynasty from the North-west, so that the assumption of a connection between the one set of people and the other rests upon the mere doubtful ground of a possibility, whereas the translation or adaptation of a Southern word into Sanskrit is very much more than a possibility, as indeed a word like ‘Dravida’ or ‘Dramida’ would clearly indicate. The distinction that Rājaśēkhara makes between the Southern Pallava and the North-western Pahlava seems in the circumstances to be a crucial indication that in the estimation of scholarly folk of the ninth and tenth centuries, the two were to be regarded as distinct from each other. The foreign origin of the Pallavas therefore seems to have no ground to support it.