The Pandyan Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century c19.25.1

c19.25.1

Some evidence on the administration of justice is available, and this may be briefly reviewed. Most of the references are to criminal offences, and they do not shed much light directly on the machinery of legal administration. We learn casually that in one instance a person was tied to the leg of a buffalo-bull and dragged for having murdered a Brahmin.² Three records from the Ramnad district of the time of Jaṭāvarman Sundara Pāṇḍya give a continuous account of a single crime and the manner in which it was dealt with.¹ A temple priest, Vāmanabhaṭṭa by name, who was returning home at night from the temple, was, for some unknown reason, hacked to death in a street by hired assassins employed by one Sattiyanāvan. The murderers took refuge in a neighbouring place and afterwards escaped from it, when attempts were made to capture them. ‘Thereupon, the belongings of Sattiyanāvan in Karuvērkuricci consisting of lands, houses, gardens and servants both male and female, were confiscated and made over, as a gift to the temple of Śokka-Nārāyaṇa.’ Subsequently, the murder of Vāmanabhaṭṭa was avenged and Sattiyanāvan was killed, we do not hear by whom or under what circumstances; then his son made an appeal, less than four months after the date of the original murder, to the authorities, the Śrīvaiṣṇavas and others connected with the temple;