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The Indian Analyst
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South Indian Inscriptions |
EPIGRAPHIA INDICA is known from an Amarāvatī inscription[1] and the latter part of the name is generally taken to stand for Śātakarṇi or Sātavāhana. Consequently, Sivamaka Sada is assigned to the Sātavāhana family.[2] The present epigraph, however, does not look like a Sātavāhana record and seems to show that a king of the Krishna-Guntur region bearing a sada-ending name belonged to the Aira (possibly also called Gālaveya) and not to the Sātavāhana family. Whether Sivamaka Sada, whose inscription has to be attributed to the same age as the epigraph under study on grounds of palaeography, belonged to the Aira family cannot of course be determined without further evidence.[3] The next word in the latter half of line 4 reads : disidhārikāya (Sanskrit dṛiśī-dhārikayā),[4] ‘ by the female torch-bearer ’. The first letter of the name of this female official of the Aira king contained in the first word of line 5 is lost, the following two letters of the word reading [vā]ya, ‘ by . . . vā ’. The name was therefore something like Revā, Devā, etc.
The following four letters of line 5 are damaged ; but the second and third appear to read gava and the expression may be restored as Bhagavato, ‘ of the Lord ’ which is followed by what looks like Bhūtagā[ha][ka*]sa containing the name of a deity. Of this name, which may be compared with the word Bhūtagṛihya meaning a class of domestic spirits, the fourth letter is partially damaged at the end of line 5 while the last letter was broken away at the beginning of the next line even when Mr. Sastri copied the inscription eighteen years ago. As already indicated above, sa (the last akshara of the above expression) and ma (the first letter of the following word maḍa[pā (po)]) were lost at a slightly later date. The above is followed in line 6, with which the inscription concludes, by the words eko [ni]vahito, the passage Bhagavato Bhūtagāhakasa maḍapo eko nivahito (Sanskrit Bhagavataḥ Bhūtagrāhakasya maṇḍapaḥ ekaḥ nirvāhitaḥ) meaning ‘ one maṇḍapa of the god Bhūtagrāhaka has been completed.’ The word maṇḍapa may mean here ‘ a building consecrated to a deity [in the vicinity of his temple] ’ The inscription thus appears to record the construction of a building for a god called Bhūtagrāhaka by a lady in the service of a Mahārāja of the Aira family and probably of the Gālava gotra. The importance of the inscription lies in the fact that the rule of the Aira(Ārya) family over the Guntur District and the adjoining areas in the second century A.D. is known from it for the first time. We know that about the end of the first century B.C., the Chedi-Mahāmeghavāhana king Khāravela of Kaliṅga, who claimed Aira (Ārya) descent, ruled over the territory lying to the immediate east of the dominions of the contemporary Sātavāhana king Śātakarṇi and that the former besieged the city called Asikanagara (Sanskrit Ṛishikangara) situated on the bank of the river Kanhaveṇā (Sanskrit Kṛishṇaveṇā, i.e. the modern Kṛishṇā) probably within the latter’s dominions.[5] In the absence of any reference to the Chedi-Mahāmeghavāhana family in our inscription and of epithets like Hārītīputra in the records of the Chedi-Mahāmeghavāhanas of Kaliṅga, it is difficult, in the present state of our knowledge, to determine the exact relation of the Aira king mentioned in our epigraph with the family of Khāravela. But it is equally difficult ________________________________________________
[1] Arch. Surv. S. Ind., Vol. I, p. 61, Plate LVI, No. 2.
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