The Pandyan Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century c12.55

c12.55

One reference to a *matha* of the sect of Mahāvratins that occurs in a Vatteluttu inscription from Tirucculi in the Ramnad district is sufficiently important to deserve special mention. It occurs in a record of the eleventh year of Vīra Pāndya ‘who took the head of the Chola’ (No. 423 of 1914). This reference is confirmed by another record of Vikramakēsari, a Koḍumbāḷūr chieftain, who claims to have conquered Vīra Pāṇḍya in battle. This chieftain was the son of a Chola princess and probably took the side of the Cholas against Vīra Pāṇḍya in the wars mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.¹ Vikramakēsari presented a big maṭha (brihan-maṭham) to a certain Mallikārjuna of Madura, who was the chief ascetic of the Kālāmukha sect, with eleven villages for feeding fifty ascetics of the same sect (called asita-vaktra). Mallikārjuna belonged to the Ātrēya gotra and was the disciple of two teachers Vidyārāśi and Tapōrāśi. These references reveal the presence in the Madura and Ramnad districts and in the Pudukkottah state—the Vikramakēsari record comes from Mūvarkōil in that state—of a considerable number of the ascetics of the Mahāvrata or Kālāmukha sect of the Śaivas. Dr. Bhandarkar says of this sect: ‘It will be seen how terrible and demoniacal this sect was . . . . Mahāvrata means the great vow, and the greatness of the vow consists in its extraordinary nature, such as eating food placed in a human skull, besmearing the body with the ashes of human carcasses and others which are attributed to Kālāmukhas by Rāmānuja.’²