In his dying moments, a person learns the answers to lifelong questions. The gods feel safe about telling him, because the mortal cannot speak of it to others.
It was futile for Veera to even try speaking. He sighed, and slept. He did not want to wake up. After having seen those glorious scenes of liberation, life would be worthless.
It was time for him to go.
EPILOGUE
Thirty years after Veera’s death, the armies of the new Hindu empire of Vijayanagar, which had risen from the ashes of the southern kingdoms, swept into Madurai. Headed by Kempenna, son and general of Vijayanagar emperor Bukka Raya, they captured all the Mohammedan territories of the southern peninsula, including Madurai. In a rule lasting nearly three centuries, they repaired all the temples and restored the glory of the shrines.
Inside the Meenakshi temple, they broke open the walls that had been built by the retreating Pandyans to protect the idols. Kempenna reported that within the temple’s inner sanctums, the lamps continued to burn.
In the outer sanctum, Kempenna found an old man with a bent form and wrinkled face, a wreck of what must once have been a healthy being. He seemed a hundred years old. He spoke their language, though his enunciation was mangled by age and other accents. The man died in his lap, and in his dying moans claimed that he had seen the lord of Madurai feed sugarcane to the stone elephants carved in the walls of the temple.
And that the elephants had relished it.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
In the early 1900s, Sanskrit scholar Pandit N. Ramasvami Sastriar discovered a previously unknown poem in a private traditional library in the royal state of Travancore. The poem was bound in a single manuscript between two other unrelated works; it had nine chapters with some verses missing and had been presumed to be lost till then. Authored by a poetess-queen, Gangadevi, the poem recounted the heroics of her husband, Kumar Kempenna.
Madura Vijayam was about the conquest of the southern Hindu kingdoms by Mohammedan invaders, and the victory of Kempenna over the invaders. The discovery of this epic spurred an interest in the demise of the Tamil kings who had held southern India for a millennia till then. This opened the sluice gates for the discovery of an unknown part of Tamil history.
*
Malik Kafur invaded the city of Madurai in 1311 CE, which was followed by two more invasions by the Delhi Sultanate’s forces in 1314 and 1323 CE. These invasions shattered the Pandyan dynasty beyond any hopes of a revival.
The Khilji invasions somewhat stopped the recording of history. We find very few Tamil inscriptions on temple walls for another three hundred years, and we have to rely on the testimonies of the historian Wassaf, famed medieval traveller Ibn Battuta and Vijayanagar records to tell us about the corresponding events from the time.
After Alauddin’s death, the Delhi Sultanate’s various satraps of Madurai rebelled against their new rulers, and the Madurai Sultanate was declared an independent province in 1335 CE under Sultan Jalaluddin Ahsan Khan. Ibn Battuta visited Madurai during the rule of the Madurai Sultan Ghiyasuddin Muhammad Damghani and attested to his cruelty in his writings. The Hoysala attempt to retake Madurai ended in a fiasco, with Damghani defeating King Vir Bhallala in 1343 CE and displaying his stuffed body on the ramparts of the Madurai fort.
Sundara Pandyan survived till 1327 CE and Veera till 1345 CE in their fiefdoms far away from Madurai. Neither of them lived long enough to see the collapse of the Madurai Sultanate, or the rise of the Vijayanagar empire. Legend states that Harihara and Bukka Raya were commanders in the Hoysala army who rose to power once the Delhi Sultanate’s raids had ravaged the empires of the south. They founded the Vijayanagar empire in present-day Karnataka, where the ruins of their capital, Hampi, exist to this day. Sensing a vacuum in Tamil lands due to the infighting among the sultans, Kumar Kempenna Udaiyar, a Vijayanagar prince and the son of Bukka Raya who also served as a general in the Vijayanagar army, marched into Madurai in 1372 CE to wipe out the Sultanate.
Ganga Devi, Kempenna’s wife, wrote Madura Vijayam to commemorate the victory over the Sultanate. Sixty-one palm leaves of the Sanskrit work describe how Kempenna, after conquering Kanchipuram, was visited by a strange woman. The woman, described by many as Goddess Meenakshi in disguise, pleaded with him to liberate the rest of south India from the rule of the Madurai Sultanate:
O mighty king!
Go forth without further delay
And throw out
From my lands this kingdom of Turks,
who cause pain to the three worlds.
Go forth O king, and securing your victory,
Establish one hundred victory pillars
In the middle of the famed Rama-setu!
Heeding her request, Kempenna resumed his invasion of the south. The final verses of the poem chronicle his invasion of Madurai, where he destroyed the Turkish armies, slayed the reigning Sultan Alauddin Shah II in single combat and brought Madurai under the rule of Vijayanagar. The rule of the Vijayanagar kings would last for another three centuries, until 1736 CE, when the Mughals finally installed their governors in the Arcot province. The Pandyans continued to rule very small pockets in their erstwhile lands, often as feudatories of the Vijayanagar empire.
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In Delhi, the Khiljis could never recover from the death of Alauddin in 1316 CE. The child-sultan Umar Khan ruled for three months before Mubarak blinded him and ascended the throne as Qutbuddin Khilji. He promoted his lover, Khusrau Khan, in the Delhi court, who eventually killed the Sultan and ascended the throne himself. Khusrau was a Hindu convert and the Turks did not accept his rule. A record from the period of his rule by the historian Barani says: ‘In those dreadful days the infidel rites of the Hindus were highly exalted, the dignity and the importance of the Parwaris were increased, and through all the territory of Islam the Hindus rejoiced greatly, boasting that Dehli had once more come under Hindu rule, and that the Musulmáns had been driven away and dispersed.’
Khusrau Khan’s ministers invited the governor of Punjab, Ghazi Malik, to overthrow him and install himself as the new ruler. Ghazi was crowned the Sultan of Delhi with the title of Ghiyath-al-din Tughluq, and his son was given the title of Muhammad-bin-Tughluq. The rule of the Khiljis was over.
Madurai remains a thriving city today. The Meenakshi temple is still glorious, with additions made by subsequent kings and philanthropists. There are no traces of the Khilji invasions on its walls, except for the decoy lingam that was broken by the invaders near the Siddhar temple, on whose walls the famous stone elephants are carved.
Whether fact or fiction, no one really knows where reality is overtaken by myth. Gods, demons, Hindus and Turks abound in the legends that arise from Madurai, and this is what I have tried to evoke in the story told here.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I’d like to thank my father who started my literary career by taking me to a library when I had barely settled down in kindergarten and got me hooked to the world of words. And my mother, of course. I wish she was still here so that she could have read this book.
And, for the record, I owe thanks to the renowned Tamil writer Kalki Krishnamurthy, to whom I have already expressed my profound gratitude by writing sequels to two of his best novels.
To members of the Ponniyin Selvan historical group who have been behind me during the research and the editing phase, and given me the support any writer would give his right hand for. In particular, Swetha Sampath, Parvathavardhini, Sundar Baradwaj, Rahul Dinakaran – also a resident of Madurai – for their encouragement. One could not have asked for better cheerleaders.
On the home front, Lakshmi and Akshey, for bearing with my mood swings during the writing and editing of the book.
Finally, my editors Amish Raj Mulmi and Dipali Singh, who reposed their trust in my story and made the novel trimmer, fitter and readable, and Saurabh Deb for his artwork.
Hailing from the old zamindari family of Devakottai from the southern tip of India, R. Venketesh has a deep interest in history
. A bilingual author, Venketesh writes in both Tamil and English. Of the three historical novels he has written in Tamil, Kaviri Maindan – ‘The Son of Kaveri’ – is a sequel to the greatest Tamil historical novel ever written – Kalki’s Ponniyin Selvan.
Venketesh is deeply interested in the science of Vastu Shastra and helps design buildings all over the world. He lives with his wife Lakshmi in Chennai, and they have an architect-son named Akshey.
Gods, Kings and Slaves: The Siege of Madurai is Venketesh’s first novel in English.
Gods, Kings & Slaves: The Siege of Madurai
War is coming...
Peninsular India, fourteenth century. The Pandyan empire is at its peak, its enemies subdued and its people at peace. Having left behind his step-brother Sundar in the race to the throne, Crown Prince Veera Pandyan is set to rule from Madurai, reputed to be the richest city in the subcontinent. But invisible fractures within the kingdom threaten to destroy it, and a new enemy approaches, swifter than anyone can imagine.
In Delhi, Sultan Alauddin Khilji’s trusted general, the eunuch Malik Kafur, has trained his eyes on the distant south, fabled for its riches. A slave captured by the Khiljis, Kafur is renowned for his ambition and cunning. None, not even the mighty Mongols, have defeated him – no empire can withstand the trail of destruction he leaves in his wake. And all he wants is to see Madurai on its knees, its wealth pillaged, its temples destroyed.
As an ancient city combusts in flames of treachery, bloodlust and revenge, brother will battle brother, ambition will triumph over love, slaves will rise to rule, cities will be razed to dust, and the victor will be immortalized in history...
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