The Pandyan Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century c15.31

c15.31

The campaign against the Chola king may be passed over as the Chola country in this period was practically a protectorate of the Hoysalas. The attack on Hoysala forces and the fate of the Hoysala commander Singaṇa are referred to in a Srirangam epigraph, where he is said to have been given over to a rutting elephant on the battlefield.³ The storming of the fortifications of Kaṇṇanūr-koppam and its occupation after the flight of the Hoysala king Vīra Sōmēśvara took place before the seventh year of Jaṭāvarman Sundara Pāṇḍya, i.e. before A.D. 1258. Though the Hoysalas were compelled to retreat and to accept defeat for a time, they evidently refused to give up their possessions in the Tamil country without a struggle, and there was perhaps much fighting of which we have no direct evidence now. The long Sanskrit inscription of Sundara Pāṇḍya from Śrīraṅgam opens with the statement that Sundara Pāṇḍya had just sent to the other world the Moon of the Karṇāṭa Country (Sōmēśvara) who had caused much trouble to Śrīraṅgam.¹ And another inscription of the fourteenth year (A.D. 1264-5) from Tiruppārkkaḍal, North Arcot (No. 702 of 1904) registers an order issued by Sundara Pāṇḍya from Kaṇṇanūr. The death of Sōmēśvara is generally placed about A.D. 1262 and Sundara Pāṇḍya seems therefore to have held Kaṇṇanūr continuously from the time he occupied it some time before his seventh year. And even after the death of Vīra Sōmēśvara, his successor Rāmanātha appears to have been mostly kept out of Kaṇṇanūr during Sundara Pāṇḍya’s time.²