Padum Kumara (, ) is a ruler of early Siamese tradition, described in the Chronicle of the Padumasūriyavaṃśa as a 9th-century king of Indaprasthanagara, a city placed by the Ayutthaya Testimonies in the Phraek Si Racha region of present-day central Thailand.
He is said to have succeeded his father Padumasuriyavamsa in 800, from whom several later Siamese dynasties traced their descent. His reign is presented as a short and troubled one, ending without an heir; the chronicle then passes to a series of unnamed short-reigning successors, in one of whose reigns the city was lost.
Name
Besides Padum Kumara, the chronicle tradition calls him Chao Krung Phan (), "lord of the city of Pāla", after the polity he ruled. The same figure appears in the related literature as the King of Bāla or Pāla (); the variants render one Indic name and are used interchangeably.
Reign
War with the nāga clan
The chronicle presents his reign as a period of instability. He is said to have severed ties with the nāga royal clan on his mother's side, which brought on military conflict; the narrative has him prevail, with the nāga forces withdrawing. In this account the opposing nāga king was his own maternal grandfather.
Illness and death
He is then said to have contracted leprosy and to have fallen into conflict with two ṛṣayaḥ, with the result that his illness went uncured, leading to his death at a young age and leaving no offspring. The description of his condition — skin becoming rough and pitted through illness — closely parallels that of in the Isan legend of that name, whose ruler is likewise placed at Indaprasthanagara, though there the affliction is present from birth and is resolved through adherence to the Dharma rather than by a healer.
Later reigns and the fall of Indaprasthanagara
He left no heir, and the chronicle relates that a sequence of rulers followed one another without interruption, each reigning only briefly. The loss of the city belongs to one of these later reigns rather than to his own. A separate tradition, the Ratanabimbavamsa, relates that Indaprasthanagara was seized by Adītaraj of Ayojjhapura during a period of severe flooding and following the death of its great king, Ayojjhapura being a polity that some Thai scholars identify with Si Thep. Since the Chronicle of the Padumasūriyavaṃśa separately lists Lavo as a tributary of Indaprasthanagara, the three are taken to have been distinct polities.
Implications for the Angkorian identification
The closing portion of the chronicle, which equates Indaprasthanagara with Angkor, recounts that a cattle trader named Phrom was raised to the throne, founded a new city east of the river, made it his principal seat and reigned twenty years before being succeeded by an unnamed son. That son was in turn succeeded by another commoner, Pakshi Jam Krong ().
These episodes have been cited against the identification of Indaprasthanagara with Angkor, on the grounds that Angkorian epigraphy records succession within established royal lineages and does not attest the accession of commoners of mercantile background.
See also Indaprasthanagara Padumasuriyavamsa Phrom of Phraek
Notes
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