North Indian Inscriptions

POLITICAL HISTORY

fortunately there is nothing to support Smith’s identification of Dēvarāshṭra with Mahārāshṭra or Fleet’s identification of Ēraṇḍapalla with Ēraṇḍōl. There is no epigraphic or documentary evidence of any kind in favour of it. Again, even if we regard these identifications as correct, one would naturally expect Ēraṇḍapalla at least to be mentioned last in the list of the rulers of Dakshiṇāpatha. As a matter of fact, this place is seem in the list, not last, but somewhere in the middle preceding Kāñchī and Vēṅgī. The names of this list could not have been strung together in a haphazard fashion,—if not in their geographical order, at least according to their political importance. This has been very shrewdly guessed by no less a scholar than Dubreuil. For, it was he who first scented in the air the Eastern Deccan Confederacy that opposed Samudragupta and of which Vishṇugōpa, the Pallava king of Kāñchī, was the most powerful member.¹ It seems that Vishṇugōpa was the overload and that the rulers of Avamukta, Vēṅgī, Pālakka, Dēvarāshṭra and Kusthalapura were his feudatories in this descending order. This alone can explain why Vēṅgī has been mentioned after Kāñchī. If Samudragupta is represented as marching victoriously southward and encountering the king of Kāñchī,² it becomes inexplicable why the ruler of Vēṅgī is not mentioned first, for one would naturally expect him to meet Vēṅgī first and Kāñchī afterwards as Kāñchī is to the south of Vēṅgī. This mystery is, however, dispelled if we suppose that the rulers in this list have been arranged according to the political hierarchy to which they belonged. One such political hierarchy is indicated by the group of states headed by Kāñchī. Is there any other in the states named placed prior to Kāñchī ? If our line of argument has any weight and as the list of the Dakshiṇāpatha rulers itself begins with Kōsala, the conclusion is irresistible that another such group of states in the Deccan was that with Kōsala as the feudal superior. And we have already pointed out that in the Krishna and Guntur Districts of Andhra Pradesh many inscriptions connected with Buddhist stūpas have been brought to light which furnish us with the names of three kings of the Ikshvāku line, one of whom is credited with the performance of several Vedic sacrifices, the most pre-eminent of which was the Aśvamēdha; that, as they were very powerful rulers, their might must have spread far beyond the two Telugu Districts named; and that, as they were Ikshvākus, they must have been the hereditary rulers of (South) Kōsala itself. Samudragupta is only two generations posterior to the last of these Ikshvāku kings. We have thus another political circle with Kōsala as lord paramount and Mahākāntāra, Kurāḷa, Pishṭapura, Kōṭṭūra and Ēraṇḍapalla as subsidiaries in this descending order. It will be seen that the region where the Kōsala and Kāñchī empires met was the Telugu country, the northern half of which owed fealty to Kōsala and the southern half to Kāñchī.

       If this line of reasoning has any force in it, it means that Samudragupta tackled and reduced to submission two political confederacies whose territory was co-extensive with Orissa and practically the whole of the Telugu and Tamil Districts. But what about the Pāṇḍya and the Kērala Countries ? Perhaps these countries were subordinate to the paramount sovereign of Kāñchī. And the defeat of the Kāñchī overlord presupposed the defeat of all states subsidiary to him, though they might not have taken actual part with him in his fight against Samudragupta. But what about the whole of the Deccan plateau ? There is absolutely no reference to any part of it in the list of the kingdoms mentioned as being situated in South India though it must have formed a most conspicuous part of Dakshiṇāpatha. As stated above, the identification of Dēvarāshṭra with Mahārāshṭra and of Ēraṇḍapalla with Ēraṇḍōl in Khandesh is anything but satisfactory. What then becomes of the central and western Deccan, which at this time seems to have been held by the Vākāṭakas ? This subject
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¹ Anc. Hist. of the Deccan, pp. 60-61.
² Early History of India (4th edn.), p. 301.