The Pandyan Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century c8.25

c8.25

We may now turn to the chronology of the period. The best starting-point is furnished by the Ānamalai inscription which is dated in the year 3871 (expired) of the Kaliyuga era = A.D. 770.¹ We thus get a definite date in the reign of Parāntaka I alias Varaguṇa Mahārāja (No. 7 in the table given above).² Another datum which is equally definite is derived from the Aivarmalai record (705 of 1905) which gives Saka 792 = 870 A.D. as the eighth regnal year of a king Varaguṇa who must have come to the throne in A.D. 862-3. This Varaguṇa must have been Varaguṇavarman (No. 9) the grandson of Varaguṇa Mahārāja. And this has been held to be a serious objection to the scheme of identifications on which we have based the genealogy of these rulers. It has been said that ‘ we have only one sovereign between Neḍuñjaḍayan of about A.D. 770 and Varaguṇavarman who ascended the throne in A.D. 862, and we are obliged to give him a reign of nearly one hundred years which is absurd on the very face of it.’³ But the situation is nothing so absurd; the interval is exactly ninety-two years; the Ānamalai record may be ascribed to an early regnal year of Varaguṇa I and the reigns of Varaguṇa and his successor Śrīmāra Śrīvallabha may have been exceptionally long yielding an average of forty-six years or a little more for each of the reigns. If a precedent is needed in support of this position, we may turn to Prof. Dubreuil who allows 113 years between the accession of Nandivarman Pallavamalla and Nandi of Tellāru separated by only one reign, viz. that of Dantivarman.¹ There is thus no serious chronological absurdity involved in the assumptions we have made regarding the identity of the kings in these records. It may be accepted that Rājasimha II (No. 11) the last king in our genealogical table was the Rājasimha Pāndya who was defeated by Parāntaka I Chola early in the tenth century A.D.² as this fits in well with the chronology of the age as derived from the Aivarmalai record. If we calculate backward from the Ānamalai record allowing, say, twenty-five years on the average for each generation we arrive at some date at the beginning of the seventh century A.D. for the accession of Kadungōn from whom our genealogy begins. Even the end of the sixth century may be accepted as possible. We thus see that the epigraphs we have been discussing at such length relate to the history of the three centuries from the beginning of the seventh century A.D. to the beginning of the tenth and this period we might call the Age of the First Empire. The period begins with a restoration and witnesses a rather wide extension of Pāndya power at the expense of the Pallavas who apparently had succeeded in dispossessing the Cholas of their ancestral dominions even before the Pāndya expansion began. It is marked by repeated contests between the Pāndyas and the Pallavas which is carried on right through these centuries with varying fortunes. It ends with the revival of Chola power under Vijayālaya and his successors and may be said to close with the attack delivered at the heart of the Pāndyan Empire by Parāntaka I, the grandson of Vijayālaya, who began his rule early in the tenth century A.D. It now remains for us to narrate in some detail the story of the age as we are able to reconstruct it, and then bring together such particulars about the social and political life of the period as we can gather from the contemporary records of the age. We shall attempt to do this presently, but, before doing so, we must give some consideration to the vexed question of the Kalabhra occupation of the Pāndyan country.