1: Rajavali, 257.
The peninsula of Jaffna and the extremity of the island north of Adam's Bridge, owing to its proximity to the Indian coast, was at all times the district most infested by the Malabars. Jambukola, the modern Colombogam, is the port which is rendered memorable in the Mahawanso by the departure of embassies and the arrival of relics from the Buddhist countries, and Mantotte, to the north of Manaar, was the landing place of the innumerable expeditions which sailed from Chola and Pandya for the subjugation of Ceylon.
The Tamils have a tradition that, prior to the Christian era, Jaffna was colonised by Malabars, and that a Cholian prince assumed the government, A.D. 101,—a date which corresponds closely with the second Malabar invasion recorded in the Mahawanso. Thence they extended their authority over the adjacent country of the Wanny, as far south as Mantotte and Manaar, "fortified their frontiers and stationed wardens and watchers to protect themselves from invasion."[1] The successive bands of marauders arriving from the coast had thus on every occasion a base for operations, and a strong force of sympathisers to cover their landing; and from the inability of the Singhalese to offer an effectual resistance, those portions of the island were from a very early period practically abandoned to the Malabars, whose descendants at the present day form the great bulk of its population.
1: See a paper on the early History of Jaffna by S. CASIE CHITTY, Journal of the Royal Asiat. Society of Ceylon, 1847, p. 68.
A.D. 1235.After an interval of twenty years, Wijayo Bahu III., A.D. 1235, collected as many Singhalese followers as enabled him to recover a portion of the kingdom, and establish himself in Maya, within which he built a capital at Jambudronha or Dambedenia, fifty miles to the north of the present Colombo. The Malabars still retained possession of Pihiti and defended their frontier by a line of forts drawn across the island from Pollanarrua to Ooroototta on the western coast.[1]
1: Mahawanso, ch. lxxx. lxxxii.; Rajaratnacuri, pp. 94, 94; Rajavali, p.258.
A.D. 1266.Thirty years later Pandita Prakrama Bahu III, A.D. 1266, effected a further dislodgment of the enemy in the north; but Ceylon, which possessed
"The fatal gift of beauty, that became
A funeral dower of present woes and past,"
was destined never again to be free from the evils of foreign invasion; a new race of marauders from the Malayan peninsula were her next assailants[1]; and these were followed at no very long interval by a fresh expedition from the coast of India.[2]