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The Indian Analyst
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South Indian Inscriptions |
EPIGRAPHIA INDICA No. 5 ] BADAGANGA ROCK INSCRIPTION OF BHUTIVARMAN recognising it as the Baḍagaṅgā inscription, the site of which he had previously described. I realised at the first sight that this must be regarded as the earliest inscription hitherto discovered within the bounds of the present province of Assam, as the script of the inscription was undoubtedly Gupta. I immediately wrote to Mr. Nath, stating that the script of the inscription was Gupta and the inscription contained the name of some Mahārājādhirāja. I requested him to send me better photographs and estampages, if taken. Mr. Nath, thereupon, sent me some estampages, very imperfect and blurred, and with their help I ascertained that it was an inscription of Mahārājādhirāja Bhūtivarman dated in the Gupta year 2. .4. The second digit was subsequently read with some hesitation as 30. Thus the inscription was ascertained to be of the Gupta year 234, equivalent to A. D. 553-54. I sent my reading with the estanpage and the photograph to Dr. R. C. Majumdar, Vice-Chancellor, Dacca University, who pointed out that the text contained a word indicating that Mahārājādhirāja Bhūtivarman had performed an Aśvamēdha sacrifice. Some words still remained undeciphered, and I therefore paid a visit to the site of the inscription and took some estampages and photographs. Thus with the help of the materials previously supplied by Mr. Nath, and the new materials obtained by myself, I succeeded in deciphering the inscription completely.
Bhāskaravarman was fifth in descent from Bhūtivarman. Their names became familiar to the learned world from the enumeration of the dynastic list in the Harshacharita of Bāṇa, by Haṁsavēga, envoy of Bhāskara to Harsha, in which all the kings from Bhūtivarman to Bhāskaravarman are named. The next mention of Bhūtivarman was met with in the famous Nidhanpur plate of Bhāskara, by which the joint right of about 300 Brahmins of many different gōtras to a vast plot of land measuring about 5 miles by 2¾ miles, represented by the present parganā of Pañchakhaṇḍa, of the Sylhet District, was re-confirmed.1 This document reveals the startling fact that the grant was originally made by king Bhūtivarman. The present dated inscription of Mahārājādhirāja Bhūtivarman turning up from the Yamunā valley in the Nowgong District is another indication of the might of this great king of Eastern India. From the fact that the Surmā and the Kuśiārā Valleys, i.e., the present district of Sylhet, were included in the kingdom of Bhūtivarman, we get a fairly good idea of the extent of his kingdom. The Varmans of Prāgjyōtisha were originally masters of the Brahmaputra Valley only, with their headquarters somewhere on that river. There are at least two pieces of evidence to show that Ḍavāka, the present Nowgong District, was originally a separate kingdom and in no way dependent on Kāmarūpa. The first evidence is the separate mention of Samataṭa, Ḍavāka and Kāmarūpa in the Allahābāḍ pillar inscription of Samudragupta. It is only common sense to hold that these three formed separate and contiguous kingdoms on the eastern frontier of the great North Indian empire of Samudragupta. Samataṭa is described by Hiuen Tsang as lying south of Kāmarūpa and bordering on the sea. This indication fixes its position on the map fairly accurately, when we remember that it was a pratyanta kingdom, outside the regular boundary of Samudragupta’s empire, and no part of Bengal to the west of the Meghnā and the Brahmaputra could be regarded as included in a pratyanta kingdom. It would thus appear that the region east of the mighty Brahmaputra, which flowed through the eastern part of the modern district of Dacca in ancient times, formed the kingdom of Samataṭa. Some scholars are inclined to include the northern shore of the Bay of Bengal or the greater part of it included in the Twenty-four Parganas, Jessore and Bakarganj Districts of Bengal within Samataṭa, following Hiuen Tsang’s mention of the distance of 1200 or 1300 li from Kāmarūpa, quite forgetting that these regions from remote antiquity formed regular parts of Vaṅga, and along with Northern and Western Bengal, must have been included in Samudragupta’s empire, and it is absurd to take these regions as included in the pratyanta kingdom of Samataṭa. The Bāghāurā In Vol. V (1937-38) of the Journal of the Assam Research Society, on pp. 14-57, Mr. R.M. Nath, B. E., of the Assam Engineering Service (P. W. D.), described some ancient ruins of the Kapilī and the Yamunā Valleys, in the Nowgong District of Assam. Professor P. C. Sen4 was the first to point out that the existence of a well-known place called Ḍabokā on the Yamunā river in the Nowgong District situated midway between Samataṭa (identified with Tipperā and Noākhāli Districts of Bengal)5 and Kāmarūpa (the well-known ancient kingdom round modern Gauhāṭi in Assam) made the identification of the region round Ḍabokā with the ancient kingdom of Ḍavāka almost certain. Rai Bahadur K.L. Barua in his Early History of Kāmarūpa supported the identification. Mr. Nath in his article under reference described some antiquities found at Ḍabokā and he also supported the identification of Ḍabokā with Ḍavāka. In his article, Mr. Nath described the ruins of a temple on a small rivulet called Baḍagaṅgā about 14 miles to the north-east of Ḍabokā. The following is a quotation from that description :─. “By the south of the Mahāmāyā Hill flows the river Harkāṭi. To the south of this river, running almost parallel to this, is a small stream known as Baḍagaṅgā, written as Barkhugā in the map. About 1½ miles to the south-west of the Mahāmāyā temple, there is a small lake formed in this Baḍagaṅgā river. On the left bank of this lake, there is a slightly elevated big plot of land now covered with thick jungles, which contains ruins of a very big temple. The whole structure, 86′ long by 30′ wide, consisted of three parts, the Maṇikūṭa built with hard sand-stone, and the Deorighar and the Naṭ-mandir built with bricks.
“On the left bank of the Baḍagaṅgā stream, where the stream has abruptly widened into lake, there are two huge blocks of natural rock standing side by side with a small gap in between. The rocks are about 22′ long, 12′ high and 7′ to 12′ wide. Each rock has got a dvārapāla 4′ high with a spear in his hand engraved on the rock at the entrance. The left rock has got a figure of Hanumān engraved on it. On the inside face of the left rock and facing the passage, there are 3¼ lines of writing in an embossed block, 2′ X2′. The writing has been partly damaged by the continued effect of rain, sun and wild fire of the jungle for years together. The figure of the dvārapāla looks like the figure of an up-country man.” Sometime in June, 1939, Mr. Nath sent to me a small photograph of an inscription inside a rectangular panel, consisting of three and a quarter lines of writing and I had no difficulty in __________________________________
[1] This was probably the proper name of a local monastery of the Lōkōttaravādin sect of the Hīnayāna form
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