As regards the position of the port of Ma’bar visited, but not named, by Marco Polo, and at or near which his Sundara Pandi seems to have resided, I am inclined to look for it rather in Tanjore than on the Gulf of Manar, south of the Rameshwaram shallows.  The difficulties in this view are the indication of its being “60 miles west of Ceylon,” and the special mention of the Pearl Fishery in connection with it.  We cannot, however, lay much stress upon Polo’s orientation.  When his general direction is from east to west, every new place reached is for him west of that last visited; whilst the Kaveri Delta is as near the north point of Ceylon as Ramnad is to Aripo.  The pearl difficulty may be solved by the probability that the dominion of Sonder Bandi extended to the coast of the Gulf of Manar.

On the other hand Polo, below (ch. xx.), calls the province of Sundara Pandi Soli, which we can scarcely doubt to be Chola or Soladesam, i.e.  Tanjore.  He calls it also “the best and noblest Province of India,” a description which even with his limited knowledge of India he would scarcely apply to the coast of Ramnad, but which might be justifiably applied to the well-watered plains of Tanjore, even when as yet Arthur Cotton was not.  Let it be noticed too that Polo in speaking (ch. xix.) of Mutfili (or Telingana) specifies its distance from Ma’bar as if he had made the run by sea from one to the other; but afterwards when he proceeds to speak of Cail, which stands on the Gulf of Manar, he does not specify its position or distance in regard to Sundara Pandi’s territory; an omission which he would not have been likely to make had both lain on the Gulf of Manar.

Abulfeda tells us that the capital of the Prince of Ma’bar, who was the great horse-importer, was called Biyardawal,[4] a name which now appears in the extracts from Amir Khusru (Elliot, III. 90-91) as Birdhul, the capital of Bir Pandi mentioned above, whilst Madura was the residence of his brother, the later Sundara Pandi.  And from the indications in those extracts it can be gathered, I think, that Birdhul was not far from the Kaveri (called Kanobari), not far from the sea, and five or six days’ march from Madura.  These indications point to Tanjore, Kombakonam, or some other city in or near the Kaveri Delta.[5] I should suppose that this Birdhul was the capital of Polo’s Sundara Pandi, and that the port visited was Kaveripattanam.  This was a great sea-port at one of the mouths of the Kaveri, which is said to have been destroyed by an inundation about the year 1300.  According to Mr. Burnell it was the “Pattanam ‘par excellence’ of the Coromandel Coast, and the great port of the Chola kingdom."[6]

[Illustration:  Chinese Pagoda (so called) at Negapatam. (From a sketch taken in 1846 by Sir Walter Elliot.)]