The Pandyan Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century c12.2

c12.2

FROM about A.D. 925 to the beginning of the thirteenth century, for some three centuries, the Pāndyan kingdom ceased to exist as an independent state and was part of the empire of the Cholas. There are only a few records that can be referred with certainty to the Pāndya rulers of this period and for the rest we have to depend on the Chola inscriptions themselves. One thing however is clear, namely, that the Pāndyas never reconciled themselves to the rule of the Cholas in their country any more than others were willing to bear the rule of the Pāndyas in the years before. The country seems to have been in a state of chronic revolt and the Chola emperors were fighting repeatedly in the Pāndya country very much as the Pāndya rulers of the first empire did in the Travancore and Kongu countries. The Chola emperors also found it necessary for a time to depute members of the royal family to act as viceroys in the Pāndya country and the records of some of these Chola-Pāndya viceroys have come down to us. But when we piece together all the fragmentary data that can be gathered from our sources, we do not get even the outline of a continuous account. We get the names of only a few of the Pāndyan kings of this period. There is no possibility of tracing the relationship of these rulers and many gaps remain to be filled by future discovery and research.