The Colas c34.5

c34.5

About the close of Pāṇḍya-Pallava period must be placed the important Tamil version of the *Bṛhat-kathā*, *Perungadai* or *Udayaṇan Kadai* by the poet who is known by the name Kongu-vēḷir, the *vēḷ* (chieftain) of Kongu. Very little is known of his life; a verse in a recent work *Kongu-maṇḍalaśatakam* states that he was a native of Mangai, which has been identified with Vijayamangalam in the Erode taluq of the Coimbatore district. Aḍiyārkku-nallār, the celebrated annotator of the *Śilappadikāram*, has said that *Udayaṇan Kadai* was based on a study of several works of the age of the second Śangam; from this the conclusion has been drawn that this work may date from the third century a.d. or earlier.⁷ This is, however, by no means certain; all that we can say is that in the days of Aḍiyārkku-nallār in the twelfth century a.d., this belief was current about *Udayaṇan Kadai*.⁸ On the other hand, it is the opinion of Svāminātha Aiyar, the great scholar to whom we owe a masterly edition of all that has survived of this work,⁹ that it was indebted to the Sanskrit version known to have been made by the Gaṅga ruler Durvinīta in the sixth century a.d. The story of Udayana is very well known and need not be detailed here; of the adventures of his son, Naravāhana, the most original part of Guṇāḍhya's work, the *Perungadai* in its extant parts knows little. These comprise a hundred sections of varying length, the shortest being about fifty lines and the longest a little over two hundred. The metre is *ahaval*, a very flexible type, analogous to blank verse in English, and most suited for narrative poetry. The style of the author is very chaste and direct, and the poem rightly takes a high rank among the literary classics of the Tamil world.