According to the Madura Purána, the residence of the Pandya kings was for many ages at a place called Kurk'hi, not improbably the Kolkhi of the Periplus, a city subject to the Pandya king, as the author observes, and, perhaps, as D'Anville notices,[1] still to be traced in the appellation Kilkhar, or Kilakarai,[2] on the Coromandel coast, opposite to Ráméswaram. One of the Pandya monarchs, named Sámpanna Pandya, invited the Chola and Chéra princes to the wedding of his son. On their way to Kurkhi they were caught by violent rains, and compelled, by the flooded state of the country, to remain encamped on one spot for a month, in memory of which event the Pandya king built a city there, naming it Kalyána-pur, which was for some time the capital of his son and successor, Kula Sék'hara.
Kula Sék'hara, in the commencement of his reign, built a new city about two leagues to the north of Cape Kumari, which he named after himself, Kula Sék'hara Pattan: he resided, however, at Kalyána-púr. It happened that a merchant returning from a journey to Malayálam, or Malabar, lost his way in the forests of Chandragiri, the hilly district west of Madura, and its vicinity. Whilst exploring his track alone he discovered an ancient temple, dedicated to Siva, as the Mula Linga, or Choka Náyaka, and Durga, as Minákshi Amman. The temple had been erected by Indra when performing penance in the Dandaka forest, for the expiation of the sin of murdering Vritrásura, who, although a demon, was a Brahman. The merchant, himself a devout worshipper of Siva, paid his homage to the deity, and was, in consequence, favoured with a personal communication, directing him to announce the discovery to the Raja, and the will of the god, that a city should be founded on the spot. The same injunction was conveyed in a vision to the prince, and the concurrence of these intimations established their divine origin. Kula Sék'hara accordingly repaired to the place, cleared the forest, rebuilt the temple with great architectural magnificence,
- ↑ D'Anville Antiquité Geographique, 122. Also Vincent's Periplus, ii. 443: the general identity is beyond question by its being then, as now, the scene of the pearl fishing.
- ↑ See Journal Royal Asiatic Society, No. V. p. 169.
consulted, is entitled a transition of the Pandya Rájákal; the original of this is a Tamil prose work, sometimes attributed to the three most eminent of the first professors of the Madura college Narakira, Bána, and Kapila. The accuracy of this notion may be questioned, as it rests solely upon the work closing with the reign of Vamsa Churámani, under whom these writers are said to have flourished; and it is contradicted by the tenor of the last sentence, which speaks of the literary institutes first promulgated by, or exemplified by these teachers having been communicated to their disciples, and thus handed down through consecutive generations. The work itself agrees closely with the Madura Purána, and is, therefore, probably, as well as it, a branch from the same Sanskrit stem, the Hálásya Máhát'mya, which work is also in the collection, and has been compared with the translations — Mackenzie Collection, I. p. 91, cxxi.
