freinds, what a co-incidence! yesterday history channel telecasted final part of marco-polo movie. it showed his voyages through indian ocean. i searched yesterday for marcopolo's travels in gutenberg project.
it was there in chapter27: in part-3. it mentions his observations about andamans, ceylone and southindia. he mentions a king called chandra banu(sundara pandya?) kayal port, st.thomas mount, kanya kumari, kollam ...etc. later he mentions about gujerat too.
there is a lot of confusion amongst historians on who vira or sundara was the illegitimate son of kulasekara and who brought malik kafur into the picture.
The Marco Polo refers to a Sunder Bandi - i.e. Sundera Pandiyan who was ruling the Pandiyan empire with his four other Brothers. He is not the same Sundera Pandiyan as one referred in by Wassaf or Kusru, but earlier.
Dear Gadhi Chidambaram,
The Chandra Banu - was a Malay king who was ruling from Nakkon Sri Thammarat in southern Thailand near north Malaysia. who invaded Sri Lanka during that time and was ruling its Northern part for some time. But I must check how he has been mentioned by Marco Polo.
Hi Rahul foreign Historians talk about a confedracy of upto 5 kings one of them being the chakravarthy during later pandya times
they even had seperate capitals.
kannnore( samayapuram) and uyyokondan near trichy too seemed to have had capital status.
however the real battle for power after kulasekara ( murdered by one of his sons- sundara most propably) was between sundara and veera pandyan. one of them illegitimate ( most propably veera)
sundara seemed to have befriended malik kafur. that was not new because malik had other hindu allies too. yadavas of devgiri, hoysalas of dwarasamudra etc. afte maliks raid on madurai and before ulugh khans invasion a decade later one parakrama pandya seems to have ruled in madurai.
This was something Dhivakar, Anandanatarajan and myself discussed during our meet in madurai. How authentic are the writings of Khusrau and Wassaf? Wouldn't there have been groos exaggerations? Mr.Dhivakar actually bought this up. I dint have enough knowledge about this to argue but my point was that if we are trusting our kalvettus&Co. why not Khusrau?
phenomenal poet, inventor of the sitar and tabla and great follower of nizamudin chisti
but if one could exxagerate or flattter it was him. he was a court poet to 7 kings or so.he must have mananaged only because of his skill.
wassaf most probably accompanied the troops and gives us the account of the invasion of madurai and 512 elephants loaded with gems and jewels.
another point was another invasion by ulugh khan still had something left to conquer. that always puzzled me. srirangam and madurai were plundered again.