The Pandyan Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century c16.3

c16.3

BEFORE we give an account of the times of Māravarman Kulaśekhara, another ruler who was contemporary with Jaṭāvarman Sundara Pāndya for the greater part of his reign must be noticed. This is Jaṭāvarman Vīra Pāndya who takes credit for some of the successes won during the time of Jaṭāvarman Sundara, and who perhaps carried out several expeditions under the direction of that monarch. There are a considerable number of inscriptions that can definitely be ascribed to this Vīra Pāndya, and some of these indicate that he began his rule some time about the middle of A.D. 1253¹ and continued to rule for at least twenty-two years till say A.D. 1274-5.² It is not possible to fix the area of Vīra Pāndya’s rule from the provenance of his inscriptions; though most of them come from Tinnevelly, Madura and Ramnad districts and the Pudukottah state, we have stray records from other places like Kānchīpuram (No. 483 of 1919) and Coimbatore.¹ We have in fact no means of knowing what exactly was the position of Vīra Pāndya and rulers like him, ‘co-regents’ as they have been called, and how the administration of the empire was regulated.