The Colas c11.79

c11.79

Attention has been drawn already to the occurrence, in the *Mahāvaṁsa* account of the early relations between Ceylon and the Tamil country, of names of Tamil chieftains which, with variations natural in the circumstances, are repeated in the poems of the *Puṟanānūṟu*, *Pattuppāṭṭu* and so on. The story of Eḷāra in the *Mahāvaṁsa* is doubtless the Ceylonese version of the Tamil Cōḷa story of the king who condemned his son to death for calf-slaughter. The *Mahāvaṁsa* places Eḷāra in the second half of the second century b.c. and the other Tamil princes mentioned in the later half of the first. If we remember that the early chapters of the *Mahāvaṁsa* were composed in the fifth century a.d. from earlier chronicles,¹¹⁴ we shall see that the somewhat confused account of the Tamil invasions of the island in this early part of its history are not bottomless fabrications, but preserve for us the faded memory of real events, and the dates assigned to these events cease to be altogether valueless for Tamil chronology.¹¹⁵