North Indian Inscriptions

POLITICAL HISTORY

when they again established their power. In regard to the other clan, the correct form seems to be not Shālada, but Pālada. At any rate, it is only in this form of the name that we can recognise the foreign tribe Pārada, which is consequently associated and appears to be allied with the Śaka.¹ Possibly the Śaka tribe comprised many clans, two of which were Śaka and Pārada. There is another class of coins found in the extreme north-west of India and outside, which we have to consider in this connection and to which our attention was drawn by Jayaswal. They are coins of the Gaḍahara or Gaḍakhara tribe or rather family. One type of Gaḍahara coinage is represented, says R. D. Banerji, by “Samudra.-The resemblance between this coin and the coin of Samudra Gupta No. 10 (Spearman type, variety a, Cat. I. p. 102) is so great that it is possible to say that the Gaḍahara tribe at last acknowledged the suzerainty of the great conqueror and placed his name on their coins.”² “This seems to have been continued,” says Jayaswal, “to the next generation. . . . .The coin (No. 13356, at p. 65 of Rodgers’ Catalogue of the Coins in the Indian Museum, Part III, Plate III) is evidently a Shālada coin. Rodgers read the legend as and rightly described it as ‘allied to Gupta coins’. The figure is Hindu and Chandragupta.”³ Elsewhere he says that they print “the effigy of Samudragupta and his . . . . .name also similarly stamped.

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As to the identity of these Gupta kings there cannot be any doubt, for the kings wear ear-rings or Kuṇḍala on these coins, while Kushāṇas never used them.”⁴ This agrees with one of the modes in which the distant foreign monarchs are reported in the Allahabad pillar inscription to have maintained friendly relations with Samudragupta, viz., a request (yāchanā) for the governance (śāsana) of their own districts and provinces (sva-vishaya-bhukti) by means of the Garuḍa badge (Garutmad-aṅka). As these coins bear the representation of Garuḍa besides the effigy of Samudragupta, there can be no doubt as to these foreign rulers also being intended by the term Śaka-Muruṇḍa. There thus seems to be no exaggeration in the enumeration of these distant independent monarchs in the form of the friendly relations they sought to establish with the sovereign of Pāṭaliputra. They were all on a footing of equality. There is nothing of subordination even in the rulers of foreign states on the north-west frontier of India, imitating Gupta coinage and using the Garuḍa badge, not simply for numismatic but also administrative purposes. Surrounded as they were by Kushāṇa and Sassanian kingdoms which could at any moment swallow them up, these comparatively tiny Śaka States were in a way compelled by this form of flattery to enter into entente cordiale with Samudragupta. And that these Śaka or foreign states succeeded in preserving their independence not for one generation but for two generations is clear from the fact that their coins bear the effigy and name not only of Samudragupta but also of his son Chandragupta II. Similarly, if we turn to the south of India, there is no improbability or impropriety in the ruler of Siṁhala also seeking for his good-will and friendship. That, as a matter of fact, there was an embassy from Siṁhala of Pāṭaliputra at this time we know from the account of the Chinese wang Hiuen ts’e, for which we are indebted to Sylvain Levi.⁵ The king of Ceylon, who was a contemporary of Samudragupta, was Mēghavarṇa, who, according to the Sinhalese chronicle, reigned from 325 to 352 A.D. During his rule, two Buddhist monks, the senior of whom was the king’s own brother, repaired to Bōdh-Gayā on a pilgrimage and
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¹ See e. g., Harivaṁśa,1.767 ff., where the Pāradas have been associated with the Haihayas (=Tālajaṅghas), Śakas, Yavanas, Kāmbōjas, Pahlavas and Khaśas and where the Pāradas have described as mukta-kēśāḥ,‘those who let loose the hair’. See also Nundolal Dey’s Geographical Dictionary of Ancient and Mediaeval India, sub voce.
² JPASB., Vol. IV, pp. 92-93.
³ JBORS., Vol. XVIII, p. 209.
⁴ Hist. of India, 150 A.D. to 350 A.D., p. 146.
⁵ Jour. Asiatique, 1900, pp. 406-11; Ind. Ant., Vol. XXXI, pp. 192-97.