The Pandyan Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century c13.13

c13.13

Mr. Sewell refers to the records of Kulōttunga I and says: 'In two inscriptions of Kulōttunga Chola I the king is lauded for having, shortly before A.D. 1084, completely defeated "the five Pāṇḍyas". But this is poetry.' It is not easy so to brush aside the clear references in the phrases quoted above. On the other hand, it is not necessary that each of these ‘five Pāndyas’ must have been an independent ruler in his own right. It may be recalled that one of Kulōttunga’s predecessors on the Chola throne, Rājādhirāja, had three Pāndyas for his opponents, Manābharaṇa, Vīra Kēraḷa and Sundara, of whom only the last is referred to in the Chola records in terms befitting a reigning king. We do not get any details about the opponents of Kulōttunga. It may be surmised that Jaṭāvarman Śrīvallabha was among them; if this surmise is correct, there can be little doubt that the account of Kulōttunga who claims to have driven all the five Pāndyas to the forest and then to have burnt that forest is over-drawn; for the chances are that Śrīvallabha survived his defeat by Kulōttunga and continued to rule, though perhaps with diminished power, and this seems to be admitted somewhat later in the same record of Kulōttunga where we are told that he ‘fixed the boundaries of the southern country’.¹