The Pandyan Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century c10.6

c10.6

This narrative of events given in the *Mahāvamśa* cannot all of it be accepted as history. First as to chronology. The traditional dates for Sēna I and Sēna II are A.D. 846 to 866 and A.D. 866 to 901. We have assigned to Śrīmāra, roughly, A.D. 815-862 so that the counter-invasion from Ceylon would fall in the reign of the successor of Śrīmāra; but it is not possible to accept this arrangement, if we propose to identify the Pāndya prince who appealed to Sēna II and the Māyāpāndya who was conquered by Śrīmāra. It has been pointed out that a correction of twenty-four years must be introduced into the *Mahāvamśa* chronology of this period in the light of the established dates of South Indian history with special reference to the early Cholas of the Vijayālaya line.¹ This correction will give the dates 822 to 842 and 842 to 877 roughly for the reigns of Sēna I and Sēna II and thus reconcile the chronology of the narrative in the *Mahāvamśa* with that of Śrīmāra’s reign as fixed by independent evidence. But then there are other difficulties as well. The Pāndyan side of the evidence makes the ruling king successful in repelling a Māyā-pāndya and thus keeping his throne to himself at the end of the struggle; the Ceylon account makes out a disaster of the first magnitude to the Pāndyan kingdom from the story of the counter-invasion undertaken by Sēna partly in support of the Pāndya prince. There is no possibility of reconciling these accounts; one of them must be rejected as untrustworthy. Now, on the face of it, it seems impossible to suppose that such a serious disaster befell the Pāndya power in the reign of Śrīmāra and that the Sinnamanūr plates suppressed the truth or deliberately gave a false account of the reign. On the other hand, the *Mahāvamśa* is a highly embellished and poetic account of the history of Ceylon.¹ And one cannot help feeling that in this chapter of the *Mahāvamśa* some transactions belonging to a later age (twelfth century A.D.) have been repeated perhaps to take off the edge from the story of the conquest of Ceylon by the Pāndya king, narrated a little earlier. When we come to the Pāndyan civil wars of the twelfth century in which Ceylonese kings often interfered, we shall see that the *Mahāvamśa* persistently colours the account favourably to the Ceylonese kings and commanders. Our conclusion, therefore, is that Śrīmāra did carry out a successful raid against Ceylon and that he repulsed the attempt at retaliation brought about partly by the intrigues of an impostor, about whose identity nothing is known at present.¹