South Indian Inscriptions

KALCHURI OF TRIPURI

in favour of the god Nārāyana who was named Bhōgēsvara evidently after the donor, and was installed in a temple at Jayapura, modern Jarwar Budrukh near Anjaneri in the Nasik District. In the eulogistic portion of the record Bhōgasakti is said to have brought by his valour the whole territory of his dominion under his sway. As we have seen above, a similar statement is also made about the Chalukya prince Mangalarasa who flourished in the same period. This suggests that the two families had experienced a disaster from which they recovered by the valour of Bhogasakti and Mangalarasa respectively. This was probably at the time of Vinayaditya’s death (696 A. C.) when owing to the captivity of his son Vijayaditya there was anarchy in the kingdom.¹ The devastation which the country suffered is reflected in the second set of the Anjaneri plates. From it we learn that Bhogasakti granted certain rights, privileges and exemptions to the merchants of Samagiripattana when he resettled the town and the neighbouring villages some time after their devastation.

The successor of Bhōgasakti was probably overthrown by the Rāshtrakűta king Dantidurga; for, from the Ellora plates the latter appears to have occupied the Nasik District some time before 715 A. C.²

Svāmichandra, the grandfather of Bhōgasakti, is said to have ruled over the whole Konkana country consisting of fourteen thousand villages. The country under his sway probably extended along the western coast from the southern limit of the Thana District in the north to the river Vasishthi in the south. Some time after Jayasimha’s death in circa 695, Bhogasakti seems to have extended his sway to the Nasik District above the Ghats. The capital of this country was probably Puri as it is said to be the chief city of the Konkana of fourteen thousand villages. This city, as we have seen, was also the capital of the Mauryas. It has not yet been definitely located, but may be identical with Rajpuri in the former Janjira State.³

THE KALACHURIS OF TRIPURI

Until recently there was a perfect blank in the history of the Kalachuris for more than two centuries after the overthrow of Buddharāja. Kōkalla I (circa 850- 885 A. C.), mentioned at the head of the genealogical lists in the Bilhari stone inscription⁴ and the Banaras plates of Karna,⁵ was believed to be the founder of the Tripuri branch of the Kalachuri dynasty. The discovery of two lithic records, one at Saugor,⁶ the headquarters of the Saugor District, and the other at Kāritālai⁷ in the Murwārā tahsil of the Jabalpur District, has carried back the genealogy of the Tripuri branch by a few generations. The Saugor inscription was put up during the reign of Sankaragana who meditated on the feet of
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¹ Ind. Ant., Vol. XI, p. III.
² Ep. Ind., Vol. XXV, pp. 25 ff. As shown elsewhere, I read the date of this grant as K. 463 and take it as equivalent to 715 A.C. If the date is read as 663 and referred to the Saka era, it would be equivalent to 741 A.C.
³ P. I. H. C., (1940), pp. 86 ff.
⁴ No. 45.
⁵ No. 48.
⁶ No. 35. This inscription has been known for a long time. It was listed by Hiralal in the first edition (published in 1916) of his Inscriptions in C. P. and Berar, but he gave no account of it then. In the second edition also of that work he gave no detailed description of its contents. He, however, called it the oldest Kalachuri record and referred it to the ninth century A. C. He doubtfully read in it the name Vagharaja in place of Vamaraja. The contents of the record were for the first time discussed by the present writer in his article entitled ‘Vamadeva, An Early Kalachuri King’, published in A Volume of Eastern and Indian Studies presented to Prof. F. W. Thomas, pp. 152 ff.
⁷ No. 42.