The Pandyan Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century c18.8

c18.8

Now, the two princes Vīra Pāṇdya and Sundara Pāṇdya had been associated in the government of the state since A.D. 1296 and 1303 respectively, and if Sundara Pāṇdya’s superior claims were overlooked, the supersession took place several years before Sundara’s rage led him to kill his father. It is hard to see why Sundara Pāṇdya, who apparently did not mind the preference shown to Vīra in the beginning, should, at the end of more than thirteen years, have become so undutiful as to turn parricide. It is, however, possible that some time before the murder, Kulaśēkhara had in some manner indicated that after him, Vīra Pāṇdya was to be the chief monarch, Sundara Pāṇdya being subordinate in rank, and that Sundara was disappointed at this decision of his father which placed the bastard above the legitimate son after the father’s lifetime.¹ But the time of the murder as given by Wassaf presents a serious difficulty. The event is placed by him at the close of 709 H., that is about May-June, A.D. 1310, and before Malik Kafur’s attack on Dvārasamudra. But there are inscriptions which refer to the forty-fourth year of Kulaśēkhara’s reign which did not begin till June 10, A.D. 1311 and one of these (No. 106 of 1916) comes from Tirukkāḷakkuḍi in the modern Ramnad district and gives the king’s usual title ‘who was pleased to take all countries’. It is very unlikely that records continued to be dated in the regnal years of a monarch who had died at his son’s hands till more than a year after the event, and that so near the capital of the kingdom. There seems to be no possibility of reconciling Wassaf’s date with the epigraphical evidence at hand.¹ It may also be observed that neither Amir Khusru nor Zia-ud-din Barni—both refer to the two rulers of the Pāṇḍya country in their accounts of Malik Kafur’s invasion of Ma’bar—has anything to say about the murder.