The Colas c9.4

c9.4

The history of the Cōḷas falls naturally into four divisions: the age of the literature of the Śaṅgam, the interval between the close of the Śaṅgam age and the rise of the Vijayālaya line, the Vijayālaya line which came to prominence in the ninth century A.D. and lastly, the Cāḷukya-Cōḷa line of Kulōttuṅga I and his successors from the third quarter of the eleventh century to about the middle of the thirteenth. Nearly two centuries before the rise of Vijayālaya in the neighbourhood of Tanjore, there flourished a Cōḷa kingdom in the Telugu districts comprising portions of Cuddapah, Kurnool and Anantapūr,² whose kings traced their descent from Karikāla. Nothing definite is known, however, of their connection with the early Cōḷas. Again, from about the twelfth century, there were a number of local dynasties which claimed also to be among the descendants of Karikāla and to belong to the Kaśyapa *gōtra*. Besides their legendary pedigree there seems to be no evidence connecting them in any manner with the ordered scheme in which the different generations of contemporaries can be marked off from one another has not been easy. Some writers have been apt to draw on their imagination and invent genealogical connections not supported by the sources; others have confessed themselves beaten in the game and have denounced the colophons as late and untrustworthy guesses, not worth much consideration at the hands of the modern historian.⁴ Before adopting this counsel of despair, one would do well to recollect that some anthologies, like the *Kalittogai*, are said to have been put together by a poet represented in the collection itself, and that no reasoned case has been made out against accepting the literary tradition relating to these anthologies and the individual poems in them.⁵ In any attempt to deal systematically with the data drawn from these poems, the casual nature of the poems and the wide difference between the purpose of the anthologist who brought them together and that of the modern historian must not be lost sight of; or one might fall easily into the error of weaving a continuous story out of discontinuous material.