A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c10.17

c10.17

The poet Māmūlanār, whose reference to the hoarded wealth of the Nandas has been cited above, says that the Kōśar started operations against their foes and gained successes against many of them; but as the chief of Mōhūr did not submit, the Mōriyar, who had a large army of which the Vaḍugar formed the vanguard, sent an expedition to the South to assist them. Māmūlanār wrote about four centuries later than the fall of the Mauryan empire, and if his expression ‘*vamba mōriyar*’ is taken to refer to the newly-risen Mōriyas, the dispatch of assistance to the Kōśar to help them in their conquests must have occurred when the Mauryan empire was still strong and powerful. This active intervention of the Mauryas in the politics of the Tamil country has so far escaped notice, but the lines of Māmūlanār are clear in their import. The political unification of India under the Mauryas was then very real, and the court of Pāṭaliputra was interested in occurrences in the extreme South of the peninsula. ‘Vaḍugar’ literally means ‘northerners’, and was the name applied in Śangam literature to the ancestors of the Telugu-Kannada people living in the Deccan, immediately to the north of the Tamil country whose northern limit was Vengadam, the Tirupati hill. The Deccan was a part of the Mauryan empire, and that Deccani troops formed the vanguard of the Mauryan army is quite intelligible.