North Indian Inscriptions

RECORDS OF THE SOMAVAMSI KINGS OF KATAK.

year, was edited by Babu Pratapachandra Ghosha, who, however, abstained from historical disquisitions ; he contented himself with saying that it was not evident from the record what Janamêjaya had to do with the grant, and that, until Janamêjaya could be identified, it was needless to makes any attempt to fix the date of the record.

......And finally, D., another of the set of three charters issues by Mahâ-Bhavagupta I. in his thirty-first year, was edited in 1882, in the Jour. Beng. As. Soc. Vol. LI. Part I. Proceedings, p. 9 ff., by Dr. Rajendralala Mitra, whose remarks on it furnish about as good an illustration as could well be sought, of the cumulative results of careless and uncritical work, following blindly in the track of writers who have handled matters that they could not deal with properly. He took Babu Rangalala Banerjea as referring to “the later Gupta kings of Magadha;” evidently, simply because, as he himself asserted (loc. cit. p. 10),─ without the slightest foundation in fact for the second and third assertions,─ “we know from the Aphsaḍ inscription “that there was a long line of Gupta kings” (i.e. the Guptas of Magadha) “in Behâr, and they “called themselves the lords of the three Kaliṅgas, and that Bhavagupta was one of them.”¹ He misread the name of the king as ‘Mahâdêvagupta,’ and represented the person, whose existence he thus arrived at, as a grandson of Mahâ-Bhavagupta I. himself. Taking an expression, towards the end of the record, which describes Mahâ-bhavagupta I. as a very god Kandarpa (Kâmadêva) in respect of religion, as giving the name of the person who made the grant, and endorsing an assertion of Babu Rangalala Banerjea that the Śâstras enjoin that sovereign kings only had the power of granting land in perpetuity, he arrived at the conclusion that “the donor was ostensibly Mahârâja Mahâdêvagupta, son of Śivagupta, but really a petty “chief of Kôsala, of the name of Kandarpadêva, who, not being himself coṁpetent, according to “the Smṛiti, to grant land, which theoretically belongs to the paramount power, invokes his name, “and dates it after him.” He followed Babu Rangalala Banerjea, in accepting A.D. 474 to 526 as the period of Yayâti, the alleged founder of the Kêsari dynasty according to the local annals, and in making him a contemporary of Mahâ-Śivagupta. And he placed the supposed Mahâdêvagupta, and the date of his record, about the beginning of the sixth century A.D.

......The mistaken views summarised above are based on three radical errors. One is the failure to recognise what seems clear enough even from A. and E. ; viz. that Janamêjaya and Yayâti were Mahâ-Bhavagupta I. and Mahâ-Śivagupta themselves. Another is the perfectly unsustainable assertion that none but paramount sovereigns could make grants of land, whether in perpetuity or otherwise ; as the result of which, it is to be taken that the supposed feudatory prince Janamêjaya, for instance, issuing charter A., had all the essential part of it worded as if it were issued by a totally different person, viz. his supposed paramount sovereign Mahâ-Bhavagupta I. And the third is the blind acceptance of the local annals, and of the period which they purport to establish for Yayâti, the alleged founder of the Kêsari dynasty.

......As regards the last of these mistakes,─ it should surely be almost unneccessary to say that, even if any germs of ancient historical truth at all are contained in the annals in question, there is certainly nothing in them that can be accepted without complete corroboration from outside. Mr. Stirling, indeed, while questioning everything before Yayâti-Kêsari, looked upon the accounts as reliable from that point ; he considered that the “later annals assume an “air of authenticity about the date of the accession of the Kêsari-Vaṁśa, 473 A.D. prior to “which the accounts are so replete with obvious falsehoods, contradiction, inconsistency, and “anachronism, as to be equally unintelligible and unworthy of notice” (Asiatic Researches, Vol. XV. p. 256). But he shewed no reasons for this differentiation, which was plainly based on
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......¹ But the Aphsaḍ inscription (Gupta Inscriptions, p. 200), and the other records of the same family (id. pp. 208, 211, 213), make no mention whatever of the Kaliṅga country, and contain no such name as Bhavagupta, which, in fact, does not occur in any record known to me, apart from these Kaṭak charters. And the asserted details are not even to be found in Dr. Rajendralala Mitra’s own rendering of the Aphsaḍ record (Jour. Beng. As. Soc. Vol. XXXV. Part I. p. 267).─ I suppose he was thinking of Mâdhavagupta, who was one of the Guptas of Magadha.