North Indian Inscriptions

POLITICAL HISTORY

Kushāṇas.¹ And further, as the Gupta coinage has been struck after the model of that of the Later Great Kushāṇas, it is reasonable to suppose that is the latter who have been adverted to as Daivaputra-Shāhi-Shāhānushāhi in the Allahabad pillar inscription. Their power about this time extended not only over the Panjab but further westward a far as Kabul, if not further still up to the Oxus.

       How far did it extend to the east of the Panjab ? In this connection we have to take note of the Mathurā pedestal inscription of the Mahārāja Dēvaputra Kanishka edited by Daya Ram Sahni.² The record is more probably in Eastern Gupta script than in Kushāṇa characters, because ma and ha are invariably like those of the Allahabad pillar inscription of Samudragupta though sa is sometimes as in this inscription and sometimes of the Kushāṇa type. The date is read 10 4 by Sahni, but the first sign is almost certainly 80 and not 10. The date is thus 84 and not 14. And further we take it is as a year of the Kalachuri era and as equivalent to 332 A.D. so as to bring it close to the time of Samudragupta in whose reign the Allahabad pillar inscription was engraved. It thus clearly shows that as far east as Mathurā a Kushāṇa king called Kanishka (II) ruled who was a contemporary of the Gupta monarch. We shall not, therefore, be far from right if we suppose that the Kushāṇa rule extended up to Mathurā when Samudragupta was alive and that Dēvaputra Shāhi Shāhānushāhi refers to one of the Later Great Kushāṇas.

       The question that now arises is: where was the necessity to distinguish the (Later Great) Kushāṇa emperor from the Sassanian Emperor who, at this time, was Shāpuhr II (309-379 A.D.) and who was the immediately next neighbour of the Gupta empire. Both were Shāhān-Shāhs and had contiguous kingdoms. They had therefore to be differentiated, on from the other. And this was done by the use of the term Dēvaputra which was the peculiar title of the Kushāṇas.

       We have now to account for Śaka-Muruṇḍa. Are we to understand by it ‘the Śaka king and the Muruṇḍa king’, or, ‘the Śaka lords’ where the word muruṇḍa is to be taken as a Scythic word meaning ‘lord’. More than forty years ago various scraps of information about the Muruṇḍas were brought to a focus by Sylvain Levi, in his paper entitled Deux Peuples Mecconnus.³ There was an embassy from China to Fu-Nan (Siam) in the third century A.D. Just at that time had returned from India the envoys sent thither by the king of Fu-Nan. The Chinese thus met these Siamese envoys in Fu-Ṇan, and received an account of India from them. Naturally, therefore, in the account of this Chinese embassy to Fu-Nan we find mention made also of the king a country in India, called Meou-loun which Levi equates with Muruṇḍa. The Chinese account represents this Muruṇḍa as a suzerain of great power to whom distant kingdoms owed fealty and whose capital was apparently Pāṭaliputra. But the Muruṇḍas seem to be known even earlier, for, the French scholar thinks them to be the same as the Maroūndai of Ptolemy who flourished in circa 150 A.D. and who locates them ‘on the left bank of the Ganges, south of the Gogra, down to the top of the delta’. The Jaina books also, he tells us, speak of Muruṇḍarāja once as ruler of Kanyākubja and once as residing at Pāṭaliputra. The Purāṇas have similarly been brought into requisition, for the Muruṇḍas or the Muruṇḍas are found mentioned there in the dynastic lists among the foreign tribes side by side with the Śakas, Yavanas, Tukhāras and so forth. And while the Vāyu describes them as Ārya-Mlēchchhas, the Matsya Purāṇa speaks of them as Mlēchchha-saṁbhava. Piecing together these scraps of
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¹ A similar practice of calling a family after an individual founder by the addition, at the end, of the word putra or its equivalent has been too common in Rajputana. The khāṁps or septs of many Rajput clans are so formed. Thus of the Rāṭhōḍs some clans are Jētmālōts, Bhārmōlōts, Riḍmālōts,and so forth; of the Rāṇāvats (Sīsōdiyās), are Bhūcharōts, Sārandēvōts, Gajsiṁhōts, and so on; of the Chōhāns are Bālōts, etc. The ending ōt of these names is obviously the modern Prakrit form of the Sanskrit putra, which corresponds to the English ending ‘son’ in such family names as Robertson, Stevenson, and so forth (JPASB., Vol. V, p. 168 and note 4).
² Ep. Ind., Vol. XIX, p. 97.
³ Mélanges Charles de Harlez, Leyde, 1896, pp. 176 ff.