Kaḷabhras

The dark centuries

Between the end of the Sangam-age dynasties in the third century CE and the emergence of the Pallavas and the revived Pāṇḍyas in the sixth, the Tamil country has almost no contemporary record. Later inscriptions and texts fill the gap with the Kaḷabhras, described as evil kings who overthrew the crowned dynasties, dispossessed brahmin villages of their endowments, and were eventually expelled.

The Vēḷvikkuṭi grant of the Pāṇḍya king Neḍuñjaḍaiyaṉ, from the eighth century, is the key document: it records the restoration of a brahmin village whose grant a Kaḷabhra king had cancelled, and it is a source written three centuries after the events it describes, by a dynasty with an interest in the account.

What can be said

Almost everything about the Kaḷabhras is disputed — where they came from, whether they were a dynasty, a people or a class of ruler, and whether the period was the collapse the sources describe. The charge that they favoured Jainism and Buddhism at the expense of Brahmanical institutions comes from Brahmanical and Śaiva sources, and Tamil Jain literature of the period, including the Cīvakacintāmaṇi tradition, is evidence that these religions did flourish then.

A reasonable reading is that a period of political change, in which patronage shifted away from Brahmanical institutions, was later remembered as an age of disorder by the beneficiaries of its reversal. That reading is itself an interpretation, and the honest position is that the Kaḷabhra centuries are not recoverable from the sources that survive.