Any new light on the dark ages of Tamil country?
Who are Kalabras? When I started reading Jeyamohan’s ‘Arugargalin Padhai’ this morning was stuck by the encounter with Kalabras in the first chapter itself. Only last week in a Facebook forum we had a discussion about them. I could only go to the extent of sharing the pages from Nilakanta Sastri’s book though I had with me chapters from M.Rajamanickam’s ‘Pallava History' with me. Jeyamohan writing about his travels on the route the Jaina travelers, the traders took, travels across India. The starting point is through Sathyamangalam in Tamil Nadu to Kanagagiri in Karnataka. He says that could have been the route the Kalabras or Kalappirar in Tamil took to enter Tamil territory. The golden period of Kanagagiri dotted with several Jain monuments coincided with the Kalabra period of 2 CE to 5 CE. Lot of research needs to be done, comparing the historical evidence available from places like Kanagagiri and Jain texts like ‘Hemanga Desha’, Jeyamohan emphasizes rightly. Tamil...