Page:Castes and Tribes of Southern India.djvu/503

Rh in a temple. His admiration for them became so great that he not only brought back the Brahmins, but actually made over all his authority to them, and reduced his people to the position of slaves. A third account makes Chandra Sayana, not a son of a Holeya king, but a descendant of Mayūr Varma and a conqueror of the Holeya king. Nothing is known from other sources of Lōkāditya, Habāshika, or Chandra Sayana, but inscriptions speak to Mayūr Varma being the founder of the dynasty of the Kadambas of Banavāsi in North Canara. His date is usually put down at about 750 A.D. The correctness of the traditions, which prevail in Malabar as well as in Canara, assigning the introduction of Brahmins to the West Coast to Mayūr Varma who was in power about 750 A.D., is to some extent corroborated by the fact that Brahmins attested the Malabar Perumal's grant to the Christians in 774 A.D., but not that to the Jews about 700 A.D. The Brahmins are said to have been brought from Ahi-Kshētra, on the banks of the Gōdāvari, but it is not clear what connection a Kadamba of Banavasi could have with the banks of the Gōdāvari,and there may be something in the suggestion made in the North Kanara Gazetteer that Ahi-Kshētra is merely a sanskritised form of Haiga or the land of snakes. The tradition speaks of the Brahmins having been brought by Lōkāditya from Gōkarnam, which is in the extreme north of Haiga, and in the local history of the Honalli Matha in Sunda in North Canara, Gōkarnam is spoken of as being Ahi-Kshētra. Gōkarnam is believed to have been a Brahmin settlement in very early times, and there was probably a further influx of Brahmins there as Muhammadan conquest advanced in the north.

"The class usually styled Tulu Brahmins at the present day are the Shivalli Brahmins, whose