The Pandyan Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century c20.42

c20.42

It is needless to follow the transactions of these later monarchs in any great detail. Their inscriptions often open with the grandiloquent Sanskrit introduction beginning *Samastabhuvanaikavīra*, and to the last they continued to be called *Madhurāmahēndra* though they had ceased to have anything to do with Madura for well over a century. During the reign of Śrīvallabha (acc. A.D. 1534) even the little that was left to the Pāṇḍyas was sought to be taken away from them by the aggressive ruler of Travancore who, though he was also subject to Vijayanagar, had received in his court a rebel governor of the empire from Tanjore. These circumstances brought on the expedition to the south, in the early years of the reign of Achyutarāya, which resulted in the total defeat of the Travancore ruler, the restoration to the Pāṇḍya of the territory he had then lost and the marriage of a Pāṇḍyan princess to Achyutarāya.¹ Śrīvallabha, as a consequence, took to himself the title—'who restored the olden times' (*Iraṇḍakālameduṭṭa*). But nothing, not even the support of the Vijayanagar emperors, could restore the glory that once belonged to the rulers of this dynasty. Śrīvallabha and his successors had to console themselves, for what they had lost of political power, by seeking distinction in literature and philanthropy. And many of them, specially Ativīrarāma² and his cousin Varatungarāma really deserved the name *Sāhitya-sārvabhauma* both on account of their own literary compositions and by the encouragement they gave to the poets of the time. They also earned the gratitude of their subjects by the excavation of tanks, and the construction of temples and other foundations of public utility. These kings liked to call themselves *Dēvabrāhmaṇa-sthāpanācārya*, and when Robert de Nobili wanted that Śrīvallabha, the brother of Ativīrarāma, should listen to ‘the new doctrine preached by the Western *sannyāsi*’, he was put off on one ground or another.¹ The last of these kings, of whom we have authentic epigraphical evidence, performed a Vedic sacrifice in A.D. 1615 and assumed the titles *Sōmayāji* and *Dīkṣitar*. He seems to have lived up to A.D. 1652.² All these rulers were in subordinate alliance³ with the Nāyaks of Madura of the line of Viśvanātha Nāyaka. A few of their inscriptions⁴ refer to the emperors of Vijayanagar and their *birudas* as well; they also adopted the boar as an additional emblem of their family along with the carps and the hook. These are indications of their acknowledgment of the suzerainty of Vijayanagar. ‘There are two copper-plate records in the Kuttālanathasvāmin temple at Tirukkurrālam which belong to the reign (!) of one Alaganperumāl Śīvala-Varaguṇarāma Pāndya Kulaśēkharadēvar, “who brought back the past”. Both of them are dated Śaka 1675 (A.D. 1753). He bears all the *birudas* known to the previous Pāndyas.’