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The Indian Analyst
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North Indian Inscriptions |
THE GUPTA INSCRIPTIONS It has already been hinted that Patañjali borrowed his definition of Āryāvarta from one of the Dharmasūtras. As a matter of fact, the same definition occurs both in the Baudhāyana1 and in the Vasishṭha2 Dharmasūtras. And, as Patañjali sometimes quotes phraseology met with in the Baudhāyana,3 the inference is not unreasonable that he was indebted to this dharmasūtra for his definition of Āryāvarta. We may, therefore, take it that from the time of Baudhāyana up till that of Patañjali, Āryāvarta was bounded on the west by Ādarśa, apparently a country situated between the Rāvī and the Beās, and on the east by Kālaka-vana or Kālakā-vana which corresponds to the modern Jhāḍkhaṇḍ. Let us now see how far Āryāvarta had spread in the time of Samudragupta. The Allahābād pillar inscription, no doubt, speaks of Āryāvarta in connection with certain princes whom Samudragupta violently uprooted. But that does not mean that this province did not extend beyond the kingdom of the easternmost or westernmost prince specified in the list of these Āryāvarta rulers. Other kingdoms or countries mentioned there must be passed in review in this connection. Thus, among the tribes that acknowledged the political domination of Samudragupta are the Madrakas whose country with its capital Śākala (=Sialkot), as we have seen above,4 lay between the Rāvī and the Chenāb. It thus seems that in the time of Samudragupta, Āryāvarta had extended more westward, that is, gone beyond the Ādarśa country which was situated between the Rāvī and the Beās. Similarly, the political supremacy of this Gupta monarch had spread over such frontier provinces as Samataṭa, Ḍavāka and Kāmarūpa of which the first was doubtless bordered by the sea on the east.5 It will thus be seen that Āryāvarta in the fourth century A. D. was much wider in extent than even in the time of Patañjali and corresponded rather to the Āryāvarta of the Manusmṛiti, according to which it was bounded on the east and the west by the seas.
The second territorial division that engages our attention is Dakshiṇāpatha. Originally
it was with reference to the Middle Country (Madhyadēśa) that the terms Dakshiṇāpatha
and Uttarāpatha seem to have been coined. What this Madhyadēśa was according to Manu,
we have already seen, when we spoke of his definition of Āryāvarta. Madhyadēśa is not
unknown to Buddhist literature also. It is there called Majjhimadesa. The only difference
between the two was that the easternmost point, at any rate, of this Middle Country in Manu’s
time was Prayāga, whereas it had extended nearly 400 miles eastward when the Buddha lived
and Preached.6 It was in regard to this Madhyadēśa that the two territorial divisions,
Dakshiṇāpatha and Uttarāpatha,7 came into vogue. The term Dakshiṇāpatha has been
pretty frequently used in the Mahābhārata and the Purāṇas.8 But that does not enable us to
fix even approximately the time when this name first came into use, as these works have
been recast more than once. In such a case we are helped more by the Pāli Buddhist, than
by the Sanskrit Brahmanic, literature.9 One of the oldest Pāli works, the Suttanipāta, speaks
of a Brāhmaṇa guru called Bāvarin as having left the Kōsala country of his patron king,
Pasenadi (Prasēnajit), and retired to a place on the Gōdāvarī in the Assaka (Aśmaka) pro-
1 K. S. S., No. 104, I, ii, 10, p. 9.
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