North Indian Inscriptions

THE KṚITA ERA

not able to surmount it. F. Kielhorn tries to explain it away in his article entitled “Kaṇaswā Stone Inscription of Śivagaṇa” and published in the Ind. Ant., Vol. XIX, pp. 56-57. “Now I think,” says he, “that, in explaining these (what I may be permitted to call) doubtful phrases, we must start from the very word vaśāt. Vaśāt at the end of a compound ordinarily means ‘in consequence of, according to, by means of, by’; in fact, it frequently takes simply the place of the termination of an instrumental case, and in the present instance its employment (due no doubt to the exigencies of the metre) shows, at any rate, that the word gaṇa-sthityā in the first passage must be taken to be the instrumental, and cannot be translated as an ablative case, in the manner proposed by Professor Peterson. At the same time, I do not believe that it would be permissible to supply, as was done by Mr. Fleet, the words “the reckoning from” simply to bring out the meaning of the instrumental. And the difficulty caused by the instrumental case rather tends to convince me that the word gaṇa-sthiti must have another meaning than the one assigned to it. At the end of a palm-leaf manuscript of the Aupapātika-vṛitti, which is mentioned in our Report on Sanskrit Mss., p. 50, we read: graṁthāgram 3135 akshara-gaṇanayā sthāpitam =iti, i.e., “the granthāgra has by counting the aksharas been settled to be 3135.” Here we have, in construction with each other, the word gaṇanā which is etymologically related to gaṇa (one of the synonyms of which is saṁkhyā), and sthāpita derived from the same root sthā from which we also have sthiti. Gaṇanayā sthāpayitum means “to settle or fix by counting, to reckon up,” and, in the absence of anything better, we would claim for gaṇa-sthiti a similar meaning and would accordingly translate the phrases Mālavānāṁ gaṇa-sthityā and Mālava-gaṇa-sthiti-vaśāt simply with “by, or according to, the reckoning of the Mālavas,” a rendering, which, like the original passages, would leave it doubtful whether the Mālavas spoken of should be understood to be the people of Mālava or the rulers of that country.”

       Kielhorn’s argument is all right so far as it goes, but he has not proved that gaṇa has the sense of gaṇanā, calculation, computation. It is no use saying that etymologically gaṇa is related to gaṇanā and is synonymous with saṁkhyā. Thus, one sense of gaṇa is “a troop of demigods considered as Śiva’s attendants.” How does this sense of gaṇa follow from its being etymologically related to gaṇanā? Similarly, gaṇa is no doubt synonymous with saṁkhyā which signifies ‘enumeration, reckoning, calculation.’ But saṁkhyā also means ‘a number’; and so does gaṇa. Consequently it was by no means certain that gaṇa and gaṇanā were exactly synonymous. When, therefore, we wrote the paper on Vikrama Era,¹ we were not far from right when we said that “the word gaṇa has never the sense of gaṇanā, and when placed in juxtaposition with Mālava, must signify ‘a tribe’ and ‘a tribe’ only.” In fact, we held this view till K. M. Shembavanekar drew the attention of scholars to the fact that gaṇa bears also the sense of gaṇanā according to the Śabdārṇavakōśa which has gaṇas =tu gaṇanāyāṁ syād=Gaṇēśē Pramathē chayē.² It is true that the Śabdārṇavakōśa has not yet been published. Nevertheless, Shembavanekar has rightly pointed out that the above citation is found in the commentary of Mallinātha on stanza 35 of the Mēghadūta. No doubt can thus be now entertained as to the correctness of Kielhorn’s interpretation of the phrases: Mālavānāṁ gaṇa-sthityā and Mālava-gaṇa-sthiti-vaśāt ‘according to the reckoning of the Mālavas.’ But, he admits that this rendering leaves it “doubtful whether the Mālavas spoken of should be understood to be the people of Mālava or the rulers of that counttry.” The proper rendering, however, would be “of the Mālava people or the Mālava country.”

       It may, in this connection, be asked whether Mālavānāṁ gaṇa-sthiti or Mālava-gaṇa-sthiti of the Mandasōr inscriptions is the same thing as the Mālava-kāla, e.g. of the Gyārāspur inscripion dated 936. Prima facie, this does not seem reasonable, because kāla must denote ‘an era’ and gaṇa-sthiti, ‘settled mode of calculation.’ The years of an era are calculated in a variety
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¹ R.G. Bhandarkar Comm. Vol., pp. 187 and ff.
² Jour. Ind. Hist., Vol. X, p. 144.