Carnatic region
[1] When the English settled on the East Coast, all South India, from the river Krishna to Cape Comorin, was under the rule of a Kanarese dynasty, reigning at Vijayanagar, and was known as the Karnataka Realm.
Hence the name "Carnatic" has come to be popularly applied to the coastal plains south of Madras, although these are Tamil-speaking districts and quite outside the Kanarese country proper.
[2] The region that was named Carnatic or Karnatak (Kannada, Karnata, Karnatakadesa) by Europeans lies between the Eastern Ghats and the Coromandel Coast in the presidency of Madras.
[1] The name is applicable only to the country of the Kanarese extending between the Eastern and Western Ghats, over an irregular area narrowing northwards, from Palghat in the south to Bidar in the north including Mysore.
the districts of Belgaum, Dharwar, and Bijapur, part of North Kanara, and the native states of the Southern Mahratta agency and Kolhapur.
[1] The government of the area was shared for centuries with these dynasties by numerous independent or semi-independent chiefs, evidence of whose perennial internecine conflicts is preserved in the multitudes of forts and fortresses, the deserted ruins of which crown almost all the elevated points.
Of this fishery, Korkai (the Greek KhXxot), now a village on the Tambraparni River in Tinnevelly but once the Pandya capital, was the centre long before the Christian era.
[1] In Pliny's day, owing to the silting up of the harbour, its glory had already decayed and the Pandya capital had been removed to Madurai,[3] famous later as a centre of Tamil literature.
The Chola kingdom, which four centuries before Christ had been recognized as independent by the Maurya king Ashoka, had for its chief port Kaviripaddinam at the mouth of the Kauvery, every vestige of which is now buried in the sand.
When in A.D. 640 the Chinese traveller Hsuan Tsang visited Kanchi (Conjevaram), the capital of the Pallava king, he learned that the kingdom of Chola (Chu-li-ya) embraced but a small territory, wild, and inhabited by a scanty and fierce population; in the Pandya kingdom (Malakuta), which was under Pallava suzerainty, literature was dead, Buddhism all but extinct, while Hinduism and the naked Jain saints divided the religious allegiance of the people, and the pearl fisheries continued to flourish.
The Chola Dynasty, which in the 9th century had been weak, now revived, its power culminating in the victories of Rajaraja the Great, who defeated the Chalukyas after a four years war, and, about AD 994, forced the Pandya kings to become his tributaries.
His career of conquest was continued by his son Rajendra Choladeva I, self-styled Gangaikonda owing to his victorious advance to the Ganges, who succeeded to the throne in AD 1018.
