A History of South India from Prehistoric Times to the Fall of Vijayanagar c9.8

c9.8

Kātyāyana, the grammarian of the fourth century B.C., who was probably a southerner and who supplemented the aphorisms of Pānini to bring his grammatical system up to date, makes mention of the countries of the extreme South, Pāndya, Chola and Kerala. These countries were well known to Kautilya and the Aśokan edicts, which last mention Ceylon also under the name Tambapanni. Kautilya speaks of the pearls and muslins of the Pāndyan country. The name of the Pāndyan capital Madhurā recalls Mathurā of the North, and Greek accounts, as we have seen, narrate the story of Herakles (in the context, Krishna) setting his daughter Pandaia to rule over the kingdom bordering on the southern sea. Other Mathurās are known in Ceylon and near Java, and they suggest the continuity of the movement from North India to the South, and farther across the seas. Baudhāyana, one of the earliest lawgivers, notices in his Dharmasūtra five customs as peculiar to the people of the Deccan, viz. dining with one who is not initiated (anupeta), dining with women, eating food kept overnight, marrying the daughter of one's maternal uncle, and marrying the daughter of one's paternal aunt. We know that the last two customs mentioned here, cross-cousin marriages, are practised conspicuously to this day in South India among all classes of the people. And Baudhāyana's notice must really belong to a very early period; for he also states that travel by sea to other lands was permissible only to North Indians—a statement which ceased to be true at least at the dawn of the Christian era if not earlier.