The Pandyan Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century c20.6.3

c20.6.3

there is not left any trace of virtue or nobility in the land and despair is writ large on the faces of the unfortunate Drāvidas.' At the end of her speech, the lady produced a mighty sword, the symbol of Pāndya sovereignty and spoke again: 'This sword, O! King!, was wrought of yore by Viśvakarma from the essences of all the heavenly instruments of war for the use of Lord Śiva in his fight against the Asuras. He then gave it to the Pāndyan king who pleased him by his penances, and with its aid successive rulers of his dynasty held unrivalled sway for a long time. And now finding that, by dint of fate, the kings of the Pāndya line have lost their prowess, (the sage) Agastya has despatched this sword to be placed in your strong hands.' The rest of the speech is an exhortation and a prophecy foretelling Kampana's successes in the south. This account in the *Madhurāvijayam* is valuable in two respects. It gives a fairly reliable account from the Hindu point of view of the state of feeling in the country towards its Muhammadan rulers, and in a matter like this, contemporary literary evidence is of inestimable value in supplementing the evidence from epigraphs. What is equally valuable to the student of Pāndyan history is the account of the transference of the ancient sword from the Pāndyan kings to Kampana. Agastya, the custodian of Tamil culture, is said to have made the transfer, as the Pāndyan line did not any more produce kings worth the name.