The Pandyan Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century c15.35

c15.35

The relations with Ceylon may be reserved for consideration later. The conquest of Śēndamaṅgalam and the subjugation of its Pallava or Kāḍava chieftain is the last military success recorded in this epigraph. This chieftain was Kōpperuñjinga whose records are found as far north as Tripurāntakam (Kurnool) and Drākṣārāma (Godavari)³; he seems to have reckoned his regnal years from A.D. 1243.⁴ More than ten years earlier he had attempted the overthrow of his Chola suzerain, but this rebellion being suppressed by the intervention of Hoysala Vīra Narasimha II, he resumed his position as a feudatory of the Chola king Rāja Rāja III. In 1243-4 he assumed the titles ‘*dēva*’ (king) and *Sakaḷa-bhuvana-cakravartin* and apparently set himself up as an independent sovereign. Ten years later he claims to have defeated certain Daṇḍanāyakas of the Hoysala king in the battlefield at Perambalūr (Trichinopoly district) and seized their ladies and treasures.¹ The date of this record falls too early in the reign of Jaṭāvarman Sundara Pāndya for us to assume that this campaign of the Kāḍava king in Trichinopoly was undertaken in concert with the Pāndya emperor against the Hoysalas. On the other hand, in the Drākṣārāma record (No. 419 of 1893) dated in Saka 1184 (A.D. 1262) Kōpperunjinga claims to have aided in the establishment of the Pāndya empire. The records of Kōpperunjinga manifestly do not eschew hyperbole; but the campaign against the Hoysalas in Trichinopoly in A.D. 1252-3, if it was undertaken in concert with Sundara Pāndya, may be taken to furnish