1837.] Historical Sketch of the Kingdom of Pandya. 



179 



written records, and is alike fatal to the extreme antiquity of the events 

 which they narrate. The meagreness and inconsistency of the various 

 sources of information might throw a suspicion upon the existence of 

 the Pandya monarchy at any remote period, did not classical writers 

 bear testimony to the celebrity even of its capital city, at the very com- 

 mencement of our era. H<>w long before this it was founded we have 

 scarcely any means of conjecturing, but the traditional history of the 

 Chola dynasty records the disappearance of that race, as independent 

 princes, to have occurred in consequence of the marriage of a Chola 

 princess with Vara-guna Pandyan, whom it calls the forty-eighth Pan- 

 dya king. In our lists, however, he appears to have been the twenty- 

 second or twenty-ninth, and supposing the union of the Chola and Pan- 

 dya sovereignties to have been thus effected before the reign of Augus- 

 tus, and the number of preceding reigns not very erroneous, we may 

 conjecture the appearance of the Pandya principality as an organised 

 state, and the foundation of Madura to have happened, about five or six 

 centuries anterior to the Christian era.* Of the events that have be- 

 fallen the kingdom during the long period that has since elapsed, very 

 few are attributed to remote times, and of them the authenticity may be 

 doubted. Such as they are found, however, in the only records that 

 remain we shall proceed to detail them, omitting the most extravagant 

 fictions, and curtailing the most tedious of those which we select.f 



* It is not improbable that some centuries preceded the foundation of Madura, during 

 which the first settlers were occupied in clearing the ground and erecting habitations, and 

 forming themselves into organized states. According to the Puranas, as estimated by 

 Hamilton, ten centuries were thus occupied ; but this seems to be more than requisite, 

 and perhaps five would be nearer the truth, placing the first establishments in the south 

 about one thousand years before our era, 



t The authority followed in the first part of the ensuing detail is called a translation 

 of the Madura Pur ana (List of Authorities, No. 7) ; it appears to be a translation of 

 the Tamil work called Tiruvalaiyddal, which is also designated sometimes as the Madura 

 Purdna. This is the work of Parunjoti Tamburan, a Pandaram, or Saiva priest, who is 

 said to have written it in the reign of Hari VIra Pandyan, in the Salivahan year 97S 

 (a. d. I051). It relates the sixty-four miracles or frolics of Sundareswara, the tutelary 

 divinity of Madura ; and is, in fact, but a translation or paraphrase in Tamil of a San- 

 skrit local legend, entitled Hdldsya, said to be a section of the Skanda Purdna, a source 

 always assigned in the Dekhin to detached local compositions, to which the composers 

 wish to affix the authority of Pauranic sanctity. The Skanda Purana being a Saiva 

 Purana, is the ready resource of that sect, and is made the parent of a much more 

 numerous offspring than legitimately belong to it. The Hdldsya is of this description ; 

 but if the date of its Tamil representative be correctly given, it is of use in fixing that 

 of Kuna Pandya, with whose reign it closes. The collection contains two MSS. pro- 

 fessing to be translations of the Madura Purdna : they do not exactly agree, however ; 

 and one is much more brief than the other, whence it is possibly the translation of an 

 abridged work, the abridgment not adhering, with inviolable fidelity, to its original, 

 as is usually the case amongst Hindu writers. The MSS. are Nos. 7 and 8 of the List 

 Of Authorities. The account of the work and its author, is from a MS. list of Tamil 

 authors, and the catalogue of Tamil books. Another MS., No. 11, which has been also 



