The Pandyan Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century c7.2

c7.2

THE normal extent of the Pāndyan kingdom in the Sangam Age corresponded to the modern districts of Tinnevelly, Ramnad and Madura, with the southern Vellār for its northern boundary. About twenty names of Pāndyan kings and princes can be gathered from the Sangam works, but it is at present almost impossible to determine their order. Some attempts have been made to work out a continuous political history for this period, the most considerable of them being that of Mr. Kanakasabhai. But there is no doubt that an account like that goes far beyond what the evidence can sustain. We must rest content with gathering the chief facts known about the more important kings and simply narrating them as interesting but isolated events whose exact inter-relation cannot yet be determined. It has been indicated already that none of the kings of the Sangam, except one who is mentioned in the Vēlvikkudi grant as having ruled long before the Kalabhra interregnum, can be identified in the copper plates of the Pāndyas of the First Empire. Nor can the attempt to determine the date of Nakkīrar (a younger contemporary of the Pāndyan hero of Talaiyālangānam), by counting ten generations backward from the date of the king celebrated in the illustrative stanzas of the Iraiyanāraha-porulurai be considered satisfactory.¹