Kharara

  The Rise and Fall of the Pandya Dynasty: A Scholarly Survey of a South Indian Empire – By Dr. Rahul   S. Kharat Abstract: Few dynasties in the history of the Indian subcontinent can claim a lifespan as extraordinary as that of the Pandyas of Madurai. Referenced in Greek accounts of the third century BCE, celebrated in the earliest strata of Tamil poetry, eclipsed for centuries by rival powers, and yet twice restored to imperial grandeur, the Pandya dynasty offers historians a rare, almost unbroken thread running through nearly two millennia of South Indian history. This article traces that thread from its shadowy Sangam-age origins through the obscure Kalabhra interregnum, the vigorous Pandya revival of the sixth to ninth centuries, the long Chola eclipse, the spectacular thirteenth-century imperial florescence under Maravarman Sundara Pandya I and Jatavarman Sundara Pandya I, and finally the fourteenth-century collapse precipitated by dynastic civil war and the invasi...