The Pandyan Kingdom from the Earliest Times to the Sixteenth Century c8.5

c8.5

which he handled for the first time. But his successors make a mistake when they fail to test his results independently for themselves before accepting them as established facts. But (1) Mr. Venkayya must in some measure be held responsible for starting the habit of confusing different kings with similar names. Thus he said, ‘The names Neḍumāṛan, Neḍuñjeḷiyan and Neḍuñjaḍayan are quite similar, and one is almost tempted to think that they must have denoted the same individual’, and though he took care to add ‘Beyond this similarity of the mere names we possess no materials for their identification’ (*I.A.*, vol. xxii, p. 65), some of his successors have not exercised the same caution—e.g. the so-called Śeḷiyan of the Veḷvikkuḍi grant has been identified with Neḍuñjeḷiyan by Mr. K. V. S. Aiyar (see chap. iii. above). (2) Mr. Venkayya also misread some of the names of the kings. He called Kaḍungōn’s grandson Śeḷiyan Śēndan (*A.R.E.*, 1907-08, p. 51) in summarizing the Tamil portion of the Veḷvikkuḍi grant. Again, in the same summary, he called the father of Parāntaka by the name Tērmāṛan; it is strange that Mr. Krishna Sastri should have followed this reading of the king’s name and perpetuated the mistake in his edition of the grant in *E.I.*, vol. xvii. The king’s name is only Māṛan; *tēr* should be read along with the preceding *mān* as a compound adjective to the king’s name. (See K. G. Sankara, *I.A.*, vol. li, p. 214). By a similar mistake he recognized a Tēr Varōdayan besides Varōdayan in the *Iraiyanār Ahapporuḷ* stanzas and identified the hero celebrated in those verses with his Tērmāṛan (*A.R.E.*, 1907-8, p. 57). In this, however, Mr. Krishna Sastri takes care not to follow him (*E.I.*, vol. xvii, p. 297). (3) Lastly he committed a somewhat serious error in the collation of the data from the larger Sinnamanūr and the Veḷvikkuḍi grants and working up the genealogy of the Pāndyas mentioned in these grants (*A.R.E.*, 1907-8, pp. 54-55). This has been set right in a large measure by Mr. Krishna Sastri giving up the consideration which was the most vital in Venkayya’s account of the matter, viz., ‘that the Neḍuñjaḍayan of the Veḷvikkuḍi grant cannot be identical with his namesake of the Madras Museum plates, but that the former must be earlier than the latter’ (see also T. A. Gopinatha Rao in *Sen Tamil*, vol. vi, pp. 437-39). Gopinatha Rao’s genealogy at p. 154 of *Trav. Arch. Series*, vol. i, is inaccurate and insufficiently documented.