North Indian Inscriptions

POLITICAL HISTORY

inos, because, in the first place, it agrees with the fact that Vikrama alone was par excellence the title of the king, and secondly the very first verse of Inscription No. 11 below compares Chandragupta with Arka which is synonymous with Āditya, both signifying ‘the sun’. And, as a matter of fact, from the time of this king onwards Āditya forms the second half of the composite title assumed by the Gupta sovereigns. We thus have Mahēndrāditya for Kumāragupta I, Kramāditya for Skandagupta and so forth. If this interpretation of the title Vikramāditya is not accepted and if it is taken to mean ‘the Sun of Valour’, the question arises as to how we are to interpret Mahēndrāditya ? Is it possible at all to take the latter expression in the sense of ‘the Sun of Mahēndra’ ? The rendering ‘the Sun of Mahēndra’ conveys no meaning at all, and the phrase has to be translated by ‘Mahēndra who is (also) the Sun’. This shows that the composite title Vikramāditya has to be interpreted to mean ‘Vikrama who is the Sun’. There is no evidence to show that there was any king prior to Chandragupta II who bore this title. In fact, he seems not only to be the first king who was styled Vikramāditya but also to be the Vikramāditya of tradition reputed for supernatural powers and patronage of arts and sciences. We will consider this point in greater details later on. A third title derived from Vikrama is Vikramāṅka, which we find coupled with his name on his silver coins, all found in Kāṭhiāwāṛ. This no doubt corresponds to Parākramāṅka of Samudragupta which occurs in line 17 of Inscription No. 1 below. Vikramāṅka must thus mean “One who has the distinctive appellation or epithet of Vikrama (Valour)”. Sometimes Vikrama is joined to Ajita, and we thus find Ajita-Vikrama as another epithet of Chandragupta II. Ajita-Vikrama has similarly to be taken to signify “the Invincible (one) who is Valour”. It will thus be seen that the epithets that have been conjoined to the name of this Gupta monarch are, all except one, either Vikrama or combinations of Vikrama. The only exception is Siṁha-Chandra which has been noted above. Chandragupta had another appellation which is worthy of note. The copper plate charters of the Vākāṭaka kings have been known and published a long time since. The mother of Pravarasēna II is, in all of them, mentioned as Prabhāvatiguptā, daughter of Dēvagupta. who this Dēvagupta was, was not known for a long time. It was the discovery of the Poona plates¹ of Prabhāvatiguptā that first unriddled the mystery. And it was first announced by us that these plates left not even the shadow of a doubt as to this Dēvagupta being Chandragupta II.² We then also pointed out that another form of the name was Dēvarāja which occurred in a Sāñchī inscription ( No. 9 below), but, which, just because some letters immediately thereafter had broken off in the record, was taken wrongly, of course, by Fleet as the name of a minister of Chandragupta. Whether we take Dēvarāja or Dēvagupta to be his another name, the meaning is the same. Dēva here must signify not ‘a king’ but ‘Indra’, because the former sense is not possible in the form ‘Dēvarāja’, which, in that case has to be taken in the sense of “the king (rāja) of kings (dēvas)” where the word used for ‘king’ in one case is rājan and in the other dēva-a singular procedure.

       Of the birudas or laudatory appellations of Chandragupta II, four are known. They are found associated with his name in the Poona plates of Prabhāvatiguptā, who was his daughter and was queen of the Vākāṭaka king Rudrasēna II. The appellations are: (1) Pṛithivyām=apratirathaḥ, (2) Sarva-rāj-ōchchhēttā, (3) Chatur-udadhi-salil-āsvādita-yaśāḥ, and: (4) Anēka-gō-hiraṇya-kōṭi-sahasra-pradaḥ. The first three of these, as pointed out above, are exactly the same as the first three of the seven coupled with the name of Samudragupta in his Nālandā plate (No. 3 below) or in the Bilsaḍ inscription ( No. 16 below) of his grandson Kumāragupta I. The fourth, again, is practically identical with the biruda: nyāy-āgat-ānēka-gō-hiranya-kōṭi- pradaḥ which is conjoined to the name of Samudragupta. The second of these, moreover,
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¹ Ep. Ind., Vol. XV, pp. 39-44.
² Ind. Ant., Vol. XLII, pp. 160-62.