The Pandyan Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century c12.8

c12.8

During this period of trouble in the Chola kingdom, the Pāndya country seems to have been recovered by a member of the ancient royal family. We have a considerable number of inscriptions in Vaṭṭeḻuttu characters, of a certain Vīra Pāṇḍya ‘who took the head of the Chola’. Only a few of these records (e.g. No. 16 of 1894) dated in his ninth and tenth years come from Kīramāttūr in the Madura Taluq; the others are all found further south in the Ramnad and Tinnevelly districts and in South Travancore, at Nagercoil and Sucindram. The claim of Vīra Pāṇḍya to have cut off the head of the Chola king does not seem to have been an empty boast. The history of the Chola dynasty between the death of Parāntaka I (A.D. 951) and the accession of Rāja Rāja I (A.D. 985) is not altogether free from doubt.¹ But the Chola king who lost his life at the