The Pandyan Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century c18.s1.4

c18.s1.4

In fact, the epigraphical records of Vīra Pāndya and Sundara Pāndya and their successors give the impression of a more or less continuous rule of the Pāndya country by them and we have records of Vīra and Sundara dated a few years after the withdrawal of Malik Kafur.² The only effect of Malik Kafur's inroad was to add to the confusion in the country already distracted by the civil war among the rulers of the land. The real Muhammadan conquest of South India came later, and even then it was short-lived and ineffective. Within ten years of Malik Kafur’s sack of Madura, another Sultan of Delhi sent an army under Khusru Khan to plunder the country again, and it is not easy to see how this was possible if the country had been already subjected to the sway of the Sultan of Delhi, with a regular Muhammadan government established at Madura.¹ The truth seems to be that no ruler of Delhi before Muhammad bin Tughlak ever contemplated the permanent annexation of the extreme south of the peninsula as an administrative province of the Empire of Delhi, though the Sultans had no objection to send out expeditions which returned with a vast amount of plundered wealth. This view gains support from the fact that the coins of no earlier Sultan have been found in the Madura district. We may conclude therefore that there is as yet no evidence of the Muhammadans having established themselves in Madura earlier than the first years of Muhammad bin Tughlak. On this view Jalaluddin Ahsan Shah, who set himself up as the independent Sultan of Madura in or about A.D. 1329-30, was also the first governor of Ma’bar appointed as such by the Sultan of Delhi.² This conquest of South India in the beginning of Muhammad’s reign, which is not so well known as the earlier raids, has been discussed very fully by Dr. S. Krishnaswami Aiyangar in his account of the foundation of the Sultanate of Madura.