The Colas c10.9

c10.9

Two or three poets of the Śaṅgam make rather enigmatic references to an invasion of the South by the Mōriyar (Mauryas) and one of them, Māmūlanār, also speaks of the wealth of the Nandas hidden under the Ganges at Pāṭaliputra. All the three poets agree that, in the course of the invasion, the Mauryas cut for their chariots a new path across some rocky mountain. Māmūlanār alone furnishes some more details. He says that the Vaḍugar formed the vanguard of the invading Mauryas (*Aham* 281); elsewhere he adds that the Kōśar undertook the subjugation of the South and that, as the Mōhūr chieftain continued defiant, the Mauryas came down with their great forces on a warlike expedition to the South (*Aham* 251). Now, as Aśoka distinctly states that the Tamil kingdoms were not politically subject to him, and as there is little possibility of any Mauryan invasion of the extreme South having taken place after his time, we have necessarily to ascribe the events mentioned by Māmūlanār to a period anterior to Aśoka's accession. In other words, this poet must be taken to provide a much earlier and doubtless more dependable, if somewhat meagre, confirmation of the stories of Bindusāra's conquests in the Deccan and Southern India recorded by the Tibetan historian Tāranāth.¹⁷ The Kōśar, who occupied the Tulu country, perhaps agreed to serve as wardens of the marches for the Mauryan Empire in the South; when they found the chieftain of Mōhūr troublesome and themselves unequal to subjugating him, they were assisted in their task by the advent of Mauryan troops with a Vaḍuga vanguard. Mōhūr is probably represented to-day by its modern namesake in the South Arcot district, not far from the famous Āttūr pass through which, in recent times, Haidar Ali came down so often on the southern plains.¹⁸