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The Indian Analyst
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North Indian Inscriptions |
THE GUPTA INSCRIPTIONS The inscription is one of the Imperial Gupta king Skandagupta. It is not dated. It belongs to the Vaishṇava form of religion; and the object of it is to record the installation of an image of the god Vishṇu under the name of perhaps Kumārasvāmin1 called after his father and the allotment, to the idol, of the village, not mentioned by name, in which the column stands, for the augmentation of the spiritual merit of his father Kumāragupta I. In stanza 4 of this inscription both Bhagwanlal Indraji and Fleet read the name Pushyamitra; and whereas the former takes it in the singular, the latter does it in the plural. On the strength of Bhagwanlal Indraji’s reading, the late P. Peterson2 took this Pushyamitra to be the king whose contemporary and protege was Patañjali, the author of the Mahābhāshya. R. G. Bhandarkar3 strongly dissented from the view, and no scholar has since then been found who agrees with Peterson. As regards the reading of Fleet which takes Pushyamitra in the plural, it has been accepted to this day. Who, however, the Pushyamitras were was for some time undecided, until the late A.M.T. Jackson pointed out that a Jaina inscription from Mathura mentioned the Pushyamitras as a kula of the Vāraṇa Gaṇa.4 Later, F.E. Pargiter drew our attention to the Pushyamitra family mentioned in the Purāṇa as having ruled in the third century A.D.5 But it is rather curious that such a clan as the Pushyamitras, which was unknown to epigraphy or numismatics before, should all of a sudden rise to such an importance as to dominate the Gupta supremacy for a while, only to sink into oblivion thereafter. This reasonble scepticism has now been apparently set at rest by the fact that, after all, the correct reading most probably is not samudita-bala-kōśān=Pushyamitrāṇś=cha jitvā, but rather samudita-bala-kōśān=yudhy=amitrāṁś=cha jitvā. Though stanza 4 cannot thus be utilised for the purposees of history, there are two others whose importance has not been a bit diminished. Thus, stanza 6 informs us that when his father died, the fortune of the Gupta House was in a tottering condition but that as soon as he re-established it, he repaired to his mother who was in tears just as Kṛishṇa did to Dēvakī when he had slain his enemy. If the comparison of Skandagupta and his mother to Kṛishṇa and Dēvakī has any meaning, it seems that some menace to the Gupta power had arisen from the side of Skandagupta’s mother and that the prince who actually threatened it was perhaps her brother. To what family he probably belonged is a question which has been considered above in the Introduction, pp. 80 ff. The second item of historical importance which is furnished by this inscription is contained in stanza 8, which describes his fierce conflict with the Hūṇas. Unfortunately this stanza has not been properly preserved; and so we do not know whether any further information on this point had been supplied to us about his battle with the Hūṇas, especially the place where it took place.
TEXT6 [Metres : Verse 1 Pushpitāgrā; verses 2-6 Mālinī; verses 7-8 Śārdūlavikrīḍita; ..............................and verses 9-12 Anushḍubh.] 1 [Siddham] [||*] [Sar]vva7-rāj[ō]chchh[ē]ttuḥ pṛithivyām=apratirathasya chatur- udadhi-sa[1]i[1-ās]vādita-yaśasō [Dha]nada-Varuṇ-Ēndr-[Ā]ntaka-sa[masya] <br> 2 Kṛitānta-paraśōḥ nyāy-āgat-[ā]nēka-gō-hiraṇya-k[ō]ṭi-pradasya chir-ō[t]sann-
āśvamēdh-āhart[t]ur=mmahārāja-śrī-Gu[p]ta-prapautra[sya]
1 See p. 317 note 3 below.
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