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The Indian Analyst
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South Indian Inscriptions |
EPIGRAPHIA INDICA BAMHANI PLATES OF PANDAVA KING BHARATABALA ; YEAR 2 It is emphasised that she came of a divine family. Another point on which seemingly stress is laid is this that she is described to be the only wife of Bharatabala, which tends to show that the latter was in favour of monogamy, whereas his forefathers practised polygamy.[1] If the expression to the effect that Lōkaprakāśā was blessed with grandsons and great-grandsons is to be taken as a statement of facts, rather than in the sense of a benediction which seems to be the case, we will have to assume that Bharatabala came to the throne in a very advanced age so as to become a great-grandfather already in the second year of his reign, in which the present charter of his is dated. The contents of the eleventh stanza, as has been indicated above, are ambiguous. In the natural sequence, it speaks of the royal donor Bharatabala, represented, as an emperor (sārvabhauma) honoured by his vassals, but, at the same time, it contains a veiled reference to his overlord, Narēndra, that is the Vākāṭaka monarch Narēndrasēna. There is obviously a pun upon the word narēndra which, when construed with Bharatabala, means ‘king’, while otherwise it stands for the personal name of the Vākāṭaka sovereign concerned. There is another word in the verse, which has likewise double meaning, and that is saumya. It qualifies vaṁśa. When it refers to Bharatabala’s vaṁśa, it means ‘lunar’ and when it adverts to Narēndrasēna’s vaṁśa, it simply denotes ‘ auspicious’. The implication is quite obvious. The Pāṇḍavas, the avowed ancestors of Bharatabala, belonged to the Lunar race, while the Vākāṭakas were Brāhmaṇas and as such their family could aptly be described as ‘auspicious’.
The hidden reference as disclosed above might have escaped detection but for a counter-reference met with elsewhere. And it is here that the importance of the Bālāghāṭ plates of Pṛithivishēṇa II comes in. In this record the Vākāṭaka monarch Narēndrasēna, the father of Pṛithivishēṇa II, is described to be as one ‘whose commands were honoured or obeyed by the lords of Kōsalā, Mēkalā and Mālava’─Kōsalā-Mēkalā-Mālav-ādhipaty-abhyarchchhita-śāsana.[2] This has generally been taken to signify that Narēndrasēna exercised suzerainty over the rulers of the three countries referred to. So far as Mēkalā is concerned, the said claim has been admitted, though covertly, by the donor of the present charter himself. It may, however, be questioned that, if Bharatabala indeed owed allegiance to Narēndrasēna, why he should express it in equivocal terms, and how the sovereign could tolerate that. The very fact that it has been so indicates that the overlordship was more in name only, that Mēkalā under the kingship of Bharatabala was an internally autonomous state, and that the prestige of its king was not much inferior to that of his suzerain or that both of them were perhaps more or less on friendly terms.[3] It looks as if Bharatabala was not bound to acknowledge Narēndrasēna’s overlordship in the charter issued by him, but that it was out of courtesy that he did so and that wilfully in an indirect manner. A somewhat analogous instance, where a feudatory covertly alludes to his overlord, is furnished by the Ghumli plates of the Saindhava chiefs, of whom Kṛishṇarāja II and his brother Jāīka I refer in like manner to their sovereign, the Pratīhāra emperor Rāmabhadra, who flourished in the first half of the ninth century.[4] _____________________
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