The Kurūmbā Origin Of The Pallavar

However obscure the source of the Mackenzie Manuscripts the above extract is a rich source of information about the very early history of the Deccan; let us analyse it threadbare. ‘After the deluge’ means at the beginning, referring to the early pre-history. ‘the country was a vast forest, inhabited by wild beasts’ fits well into the image of Deccan that emerges from Hwen Thsang’s ‘a great forest which is infested with savage animals and desert’ and Al-Beruni’s ‘an animal called sharava larger than a ganda.’ [Beal, 1911 :The Life of Hiuen-Tsiang by the Shaman Hwui Li, 146; Sachau, 1910 : Alberuni’s India, 203] ‘A wild race of men arose; and, destroying the wild beasts, dwelt in certain districts. … men were naked savages’ matches the description of vēdar we have encountered earlier. [Stuart, 1895 : Madras District Manuals – North Arcot, Vol. 1, 234; Thurston, 1909 : Castes And Tribes Of Southern India, Vol. 7, 332] ‘Many years after, the Curumbars arose in the Carnāta country’; that confirms our hypothesis that the kur followed the vēd in Deccan. ‘… they were murderers’; that is what the tāmiḷ texts said about the vaḍukar. ‘They chose a man (who) was called Camanda Curumba Prabhu, and Palal Rāja’; could the name pallavar have been derived from ‘Palal’ ? ‘While they were ruling, there was a commerce carried on by ships’; that conforms to what we know about the Pallavar. The extensive, massive and fabulous heritage of Māmallapuram is a living testimony to their trading success; ‘Traditions state that a very considerable sea-trade was carried on by them with foreign countries’ says Stuart in the quotation above. One may find it difficult to reconcile the present thoroughly ‘brāmhaṇ’ character of the Shore Temple and other sculptures at Māmallapuram with the kur origin of the Pallavar; the fact is that the artefacts have undergone destructive modifications over the last eleven centuries. [Dehejia et al, 2010 : Addition, Erasure, and Adaptation : Interventions in the Rock-Cut Monuments of Māmallapuram, in Archives of Asian Art, Vol 60, 9