The settlement of Pudukkottai

Settlement in the Pudukkottai area was relatively sparse until the early Cola period, that is the ninth and tenth centuries. However, the construction of a number of early rock cut temples of the Pallava style, the occupation of the area's numerous natural caves by wandering hunters and herders, Jaina ascetics, and early settlers, occasional Caṅkam literary references to chieftains in the area, and a few lithic inscriptions detailing such events as the feeding of Brahmans, the construction of a sluice, and the provision of arrangements for sacrifice and puja worship suggest that the area had been by no means unoccupied (Ayyar 1940, 526–527, 542, 546; IPS nos. 1–19; CLIPS). With the coming of the Cola era there is strong evidence of increasing agrarian settlement, the growth of locality institutions such as community, village, and town assemblies, and the construction and expansion of temples. During the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, which included periods of both Cola and Pantiya hegemony over the region, many of the local level social and political institutions which remain important in Pudukkottai through to the nineteenth century are already identifiable.

Oral traditions and palm leaf manuscripts provide accounts of settlement in Pudukkottai which express certain fundamental features of social and political relations in the early medieval period. Perhaps the most cited version is found in the Tekkattur palm leaf manuscript: