collectors of royal taxes, and to have grievously oppressed Xavier's converts among the fishermen of Travancore.*[1] Dr. Caldwell, alluding to Xavier's letters, says †[2] that these Badages were no doubt Vadages or men from the North, and is of opinion that a Jesuit writer of the time who called them Nayars was mistaken, and that they were really Nayakans from Madura. I believe, however, that the Jesuit rightly called them Nayars, for I find that Father Organtino, writing in 1568, speaks of these Badages as people from Narasinga (a kingdom north of Madura, lying close to Bishnaghur).‡[3] Bishnaghur is, of course, Vijayanagar, and the kingdom of Narasinga was the name frequently given by the Portuguese to Vijayanagar. Almost every page of Mr.Sewell's interesting book on Vijayanagar bears testimony to the close connection between Vijayanagar and the West Coast. Dr. A. C. Burnell tells us that the kings who ruled Vijayanagar during the latter half of the fourteenth century belonged to a low non-Aryan caste, namely, that of Canarese cow-herds. §[4] They were therefore closely akin to the Nayars, one of the leading Rajas among whom at the present time, although officially described as a Samanta, is in reality of the Eradi, i.e., cow-herd caste. ‖[5] It is remarkable that Colonel (afterwards Sir Thomas) Munro, in the memorandum written by him in 1802 ¶[6] on the Poligars of the Ceded Districts,
- ↑ * Father Coleridge's Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier.
- ↑ † History of Tinnevelly.
- ↑ ‡ Coleridge's Xavier. §
- ↑ § Burnell Translation of the Daya Vibhaga, Introduction. Vide also Elements of South Indian Palaeography (2nd ed., p. 109), where Dr. Burnell says that it is certain that the Vijayanagar kings were men of low caste.
- ↑ ‖I Vide Glossary, Report of the Malabar Marriage Commission, p. 2, and Day's Land of the Permauls, p. 44.
- ↑ ¶ Fifth Report of the Committee on the affairs of the East India Company, II, 499, 530. Reprint by Higginbotham, Madras.
