South Indian Inscriptions

KALACHURI CHEDI - ERA

‘the era of the Trikūtakas, of which the two hundred and forty-fifth year is mentioned in Dr. Bird’s Kanhēri plate.’¹

The nearness of the epoch 244-45 A. C. suggested by Bhagvanlal to the epoch of the Chēdi era (249 A. C.) led General Cunningham to suspect that the two eras might be identical. Calculating on this supposition, he found that the date of the Navsāri grant, ‘Monday or Tuesday, the 15th day of the bright fortnight of Māgha of Samvat 456, on the occasion of an eclipse of the moon,' corresponded to the 2nd February 706 A. C., which was a Tuesday and on which occurred an eclipse of the moon. He also found that the date of the Kāvī plate ‘Sunday, the 1oth day of the bright fortnight of the month Ashādha of Samvat 486’ regularly corresponded to Sunday, the 24th June 736 A. C.² In both these cases the corresponding Christian year was obtained by adding 250 to the (Chēdi) year showing clearly that the epoch of the Chedi era was not 249 A. C., but 249-50 A. C.

In 1884, in his article on the Pārdī plates of Dahrasēna, published in the Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (Vol. XVI, p. 346), Dr. Bhagvanlal Indraji accepted the view that the era used by the Gurjaras and the Chālukyas of Gujarat commenced in 249 A. C., but he pointed out that it was distinctly called the era of the Traikūtakas in Dr. Bird’s Kanhēri plate. He referred the date 207 of the Pārdī plates of the Traikūtaka king Dahrasēna to the same era and observed that the grant afforded indisputable corroboration of the existence of the Traikūtaka dynasty which he had deduced from Dr. Bird’s plate.

In the same year, Dr. R. G. Bhandarkar published his Early History of the Deccan (first ed.), in which he questioned the correctness of Dr. Bhagvanlal’s view that the date 421 of Śryāśraya Śīlāditya’s grant is in an era with 250 A. C. as its initial date, on the ground that the interval between the two brothers–Mangalarāja and Śryāśraya-becomes 60 years, which unquestionably is too long.³ He further suggested that the date was in the Gupta era ‘which was one of those in ordinary use in Gujarat.’

In 1886, Dr. Bhagvanlal contributed a paper entitled 'Two New Grants of the Chālukya Dynasty' to the International Oriental Congress, Vienna, in which he pointed out that Dr. Bhandarkar's view-that the grants of the Gujarat Chālukyas are dated in the Gupta era- would lead to the conclusion that Śryāśraya reigned as Yuvarāja from 10 to 32 years later than his younger brother Mangalarāja who was a 'king'-which was clearly impossible. He further made some ingenious conjectures about the circumstances which led to the foundation of the era. The founder of the era, according to him, was king Īśvaradatta who interrupted the rule of the Western Kshatrapas and whose coins, dated in the first and second years of his reign, show that he assumed the titles Rājan and Kshatrapa. "Other kings", he proceeded to state, "bearing names which end in datta, have left thier records in the caves of Nasik, and state that they are Ābhīras by caste. This circumstance permits us to infer that they belong to the Abhīra dynasty which, probably coming by sea from Sindh, conquered the western coast and made Trikūta its capital. Īśvaradatta whom I consider to belong to it probably attacked and obtained a victory over the Kshatrapas. After he had consolidated his power, he issued his own coins, copying the Kshatrapa currency of the district. His coins particularly resemble those of the Kshatrapa Vīradāman and his brother Vijayasēna. The end of the reign of the latter falls, as the coins show, in the year 170 of the Kshatrapa era. If we take this to be the Śaka era, the time of
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¹ Ind. Ant., Vol. XIII, p. 76.
² See Fleet’s note on Pandit Bhagvanlal’s article on the Navsāri plates of Jayabhata III. Ind. Ant., Vol. XIII, pp.76-77.E. H. D., (first ed.), p. 102.