History of the Pallavas of Kanchi c9.s2.95

c9.s2.95

*Some Objections.*—But as against this mere supposition, there are serious difficulties in the way of our accepting the assumption of any break in the main line of Pallava kings from the earliest times. At any rate the mere fact of certain copper-plates being addressed from places situated in the Telugu districts far away from the capital city cannot be held to support the view that the king or kings who issued them should necessarily have lost possession of Kāñchi. Such at any rate is not the indication that we get from the large numbers of copper-plates and stone records of the Pallava kings obtained in various parts of the country. In these records there is not the remotest suggestion that the Pallava kings at any period in their rule lost possession of the city of Conjeevaram for any appreciable length of time. A reference in the Vēlūrpāḷayam plates ² of Nandivarman III to the capture of Kāñchi has curiously been interpreted as meaning that Kumāraviṣṇu for the first time after the capture of the city by the Chōḷas in the days of Karikāla, recaptured it. Such an assumption appears however to be unwarranted. In the first place it is just possible that the capture of Kāñchi alluded to in the Vēlūrpāḷyam plates is a reference to his having obtained possession of the city from a collateral cousin, or some other foreign power, such as the Kadambas, which had obtained possession of the city for a short period. In the second place if the fact of the capture of Kāñchi from the Chōḷas is at all true, it is strange that the Vēlūrpāḷyam plates should not have made mention of the fact in recording such a distinguished achievement, more especially as Buddhavarma another king is mentioned as the ‘submarine-fire to the ocean-like army of the Chōḷas’ *Chola-sainyārṇava-vāḍabhāgni* (verse 8). But the insuperable difficulty in postulating a Chōḷa occupation in the interval between the Pallava kings of the Prakrit charters and those of Simhavishṇu, based merely upon the stray reference to the recapture of Kāñchīpuram by Kumāravishṇu and on the fact of the charters of the Pallavas for some period being dated from places outside the capital at Kāñchi, lies in the impossibility of accommodating the reign of Karikāla and all the events connected with the history of his reign to this period. According to any rational scheme of chronology it is very difficult to find a place for Karikāla and his successors midway between the Pallava kings of the Prakrit charters and those of the Sanskrit charters as suggested by the epigraphists. The facts relied upon by them as evidence for this position for Karikāla are derived from late Eastern Chāḷukya copper-plates some of the facts being incredible in themselves.¹ Altogether the data for the Chōḷa occupation of Kāñchi during the Pallava rule are too meagre and unsatisfactory to be seriously considered as justifying the assumption of a Chōḷa interregnum.