i am sending across a mail from Dr. Jaybee on the pandyas
:-) The Pandyas are hard-core die-hards. Their history goes back far into the dim-past. Mangudi Marudhan of the Third Sangam says that PalyagaSalai Mudhukudumi Peruvalzudhi was an ancestor of Pandyan Nedunjelziyan. PalYagasalai lived before 600 BC. The Third Sangam disappeared in 283 AD. There was a combination of holocausts in Pandya nadu and the country was depopulated and a large part of it was wilderness and wasteland. In addition, there were aliens who invaded and captured the country. After ten generations, the Pandya king repopulated the country and in a few more generations, the Panda King Kadungon got rid of the alien rule. He and his descendants made the Pandya country very prosperous and powerful. And then the expansion of the Cholzas began and direct confrontation took place for around a century. Even RajaRaja I who captured it finally, could not rid the country of the Pandyas who appeared and reappeared. There were five lines of Pandyas at any one time ruling from five different places. The main one was in Madurai who was the chief among the five. Rajendra went to the extent of abolishing the Pandya dynasty altogether. He let his sons and the sons of his sons take turns to rule as Cholza-Pandya Viceroys. But he could do so only for about forty years. Kuloththunga I created many cantonments along the north to south axis of Pandyanadu. He let go of Ceylon and Venginadu totally. But he let the Pandyas rule as his subordinates. One of the Pandyas played a major rule in the Kalinga War of Kuloththunga. During the last part of his rule, King SriVallabha Pandya was issuing his own inscriptions in his name in the northern Pandya nadu which was bordering on Cholza country. This was in 1120 AD. The Pandyas were ruling as subordinates to the Cholzas mostly for namesake until 1168 when the First Pandyan Civil War took place. Sinhalese intervention helped one faction of the Pandyas. It almost destroyed the Cholza kingdom. But Rajadhiraja II and Kuloththunga III managed to subdue them. The last two years of Kuloththunga Cholza III's rule saw the rise of the Pandyas under Maravarman Sundara Pandya I who partially destroyed the Cholza country. 1276AD., the Cholzas disappeared and the whole of Tamilnadu came under the Pandya rule. In 1210AD, the second Pandyan Civil War started. One of the warring parties invited Sultan Khalji's help. Malik Kafur, Khusrau, and Ulugh Khan's invasion, looting, plunder and destruction took place from 1313 until 1323 when the Pandya country was annexed to the Delhi Sultanate. But the Pandyas were fighting against the Turks and between themselves. One of the most effective one, Parakrama Pandya was taken to Delhi in chains. When the Vijayanagarians captured the country in 1376 AD, the Pandyas were around as minor rulers in several places. Visvanatha Nayakka had to fight a duel against one of the Pancha Pandyas. We hear about Pandyas as minor rulers until the late 1600's and early seventeen hundreds. The great grandfather of Kattabommu Nayakkan appropriated some land from the contemporary Pandyas . He double-crossed his boss, Ettappa Nayakkan from whom also he misappropriated some land and kept him in check by instilling a fear about the Pandyas. The Pandyas became Polygars under the Nayakdom of Madurai and later on under the Arcot Nawab. Under the British rule, they became zamindars. Yes, siree. They are still aound. Right from the City of Then-Madurai and KapataPuram of Kumari, onwards to Madurai which they occupied for more than two thousand years and then to Thirunelveli, and later on to ThenKasi and KarivalamvandhaNalluur, and KayaththaaRu and now along the out-skirts of the Western Ghats. Real Die-Hards, huh?