Page:The Tamils Eighteen Hundred Years Ago.djvu/20

Rh by ten different persons. I counted the names of more than 514 different poets in these collections taken together. The number of these authors is so large that we may safely assume that the eldest of them might have lived six or seven centuries before the age of Nilakandan. This would allow an average of about 100 authors per century, which is by no means a small number. The Akam contains many verses which allude to Karikal Chôla and the Chera kings Athan and Chenkudduvan. Ten stanzas of the Pathirruppathu composed by Paranar, one of the poets of the last Sangha, are in praise of Chenkudduva Chera. It is beyond doubt therefore that Chenkudduva Chera lived long before the close of the eighth century.

More definite information regarding the date of the last Sangha is furnished by the allusions to historic personages which occur in the poems composed during the reigns of the Chola king Karikal, his son-in-law the Chera king Athan and the latter’s son Chenkudduva Chera alias Imaya Varman. The last mentioned Chera King had a younger brother Ilanko-Adikal, who became a monk of the Nigrantha Sect. He was the author of a long poem the Chilappathikâram in which be relates that at a certain festival held by his brother Imaya Varman at the Chera capital, Gajabâhu, the king of Lanka attended with an unnamed King of Malava. This allusion to a king of Ceylon enables us to fix the date of Imaya Varman. In the long lists of the kings of Ceylon preserved in Singhalese chronicles, the name Gajabâhu occurs only twice. GajabAhu I lived in the early part of the second century A.D. and Gajabâhu II in the twelfth century. If the latter was the king referred to in the Chilappathikaramn, Karikal Chôla, the grandfather of Gajabâhu’s contemporary, Imaya Varman should have lived in the eleventh or twelfth century A.D. But in many