Which of the following was the capital of Chera dynasty ?

Question

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Correct — A, Kuravur/Karur. The booklet's double spelling is its way of rendering Karuvur, the older Tamil form of the name of modern Karur in western Tamil Nadu, and that is where the early historic Cheras had their inland capital. Historians write the name as Vanchi-Karuvur or Vanchi-Karur, in the Kongu country, and the identification is not a literary guess — it rests on excavation. Karur stands on the Amaravati river, and the riverbed and the town have yielded large quantities of Chera copper coins bearing the dynasty's bow-and-arrow emblem, bronze dies for striking punch-marked coins, indicating a Chera mint on the spot, sherds of Roman amphorae, and impure silver portrait coins carrying Tamil-Brahmi legends such as Makkotai, Kollippurai and Kol-Irumporai. Ten miles to the north, at Pugalur, two almost identical Tamil-Brahmi inscriptions of about the second century CE record three generations of Chera rulers granting a rock shelter to a Jain monk. The standard scheme of the three crowned kings of the Tamil country places the Pandyas at Madurai, the Cholas at Uraiyur near Tiruchirappalli, and the Cheras at Vanchi-Karuvur, each with a great port as a second capital — Korkai for the Pandyas, Puhar or Kaveripumpattinam for the Cholas, and Muchiri (Muziris) for the Cheras, with Thondi as a second Chera port. One honest complication a good candidate should know: the Chera family ruled in branches, so 'the' capital is a simplification. The Irumporai or Porai branch ruled from Vanchi-Karur in the Kongu country, while another branch had its headquarters at Muchiri-Vanchi and Thondi on the Kerala coast, and the Vanchi where Chenkuttuvan consecrated the Pattini temple in the Silappadikaram is the coastal one. None of that helps the other options, because neither Kanchipuram nor Madurai was ever a Chera seat.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) The Pallava capital, and the wrong period as well as the wrong dynasty. The Pallavas rose in the northern Tamil country after the Sangam age and Kanchipuram was their political and religious centre, later passing to the Cholas. It has no association with the Cheras, whose territory lay in central Kerala and the Kongu country to the west.  (c) The Pandya capital, and the single most confusable option because it belongs to the same Sangam-age triad. Madurai on the Vaigai was the Pandyan seat, and the Pandyas were the Cheras' rivals — one Pandya ruler, 'Thalaiyalanganam' Nedum Chezhian, is recorded as having captured the Chera Mantharam Cheral Irumporai in battle.  (d) This needs at least two of the first three to be Chera capitals, and only one is. Kanchipuram was Pallava and Madurai Pandya, so no second option can join Karur. It is worth noting why the option nevertheless feels plausible: the Cheras genuinely did have more than one capital, but the others were Muchiri and Thondi on the Kerala coast, and neither of those is printed here.

Concept: The early historic Tamil country, roughly the second century BCE to the third century CE, was shared by three ruling families known collectively as the muvendar or three crowned kings — Chera, Chola and Pandya — alongside smaller chieftaincies. Their existence is attested from outside as well as within: Ashoka's major rock edicts name the Cholas, Pandyas, Satiyaputras and Keralaputras — 'Kedalaputo', the Cheras — as peoples on his southern border, and Graeco-Roman writers from Pliny the Elder and the Periplus Maris Erythraei to Ptolemy describe trade with the Chera country, which the Periplus calls Keprobotras. The Chera realm covered present-day central Kerala and the Kongu country of western Tamil Nadu, and its strategic asset was the Palakkad Gap, the break in the Western Ghats through which the trade route ran from the Malabar ports along the Noyyal valley to Karur. Its emblem was the bow and arrow, as the Chola's was the tiger and the Pandya's the fish. The Chera king best known to literature is Chenkuttuvan, celebrated in the Silappadikaram of Ilango Adigal for installing the cult of Pattini or Kannaki — a consecration the poem says was attended by Gajabahu of Sri Lanka, which is the peg on which the chronology of the whole period hangs.

State PCS 2024 Q111 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q111 — History PYQ with Answer