Studies in Cola History and Administration c7.184

c7.184

discussion, that group III furnishes very valuable corroboration on some important points and comprises poems either contemporary or nearly so, and that all the other statements that cluster round the name of Karikāla in literature and epigraphy must, if at all, be accepted only with very great caution. On the age of Karikāla we have reached the negative conclusion that the fifth century date, based as it is entirely on the Vijayāditya-Trilōcana-Karikāla synchronism is utterly untrustworthy. One wonders, in fact, that it ever came to be proposed at all on such evidence! For the rest, the date of the king is closely bound up, the more so when his story is shorn of all its later legendary accretions, with one of the most vexed questions of South Indian chronology. I have stated my reasons elsewhere* for holding that the literature of the Śaṅgam belongs to the early centuries of the Christian era.