South Indian Inscriptions

MISCELLANEOUS

pointed out¹ that if the date is taken to correspond to 642-3 A.C., Vijayarāja would be ruling about twenty –five years before his grand-uncle ,Vikramāditya I, who flourished between 670 and 680 A.C.² The Pandit, therefore, proposed to refer the date to the Gupta era and take it as equivalent to 713 A.C. This present no chronological difficulties. For, Dharāśraya-Jayasimha, a younger brother of Vikramāditya I,was ruling at Navsāri in Southern Gujarat from 671 A.C. to 693 A.C.³ If Vijayarāja was his grandson, it is not improbable that he should be ruling twenty-one years after Jayasimha’s latest known date.

But the grant is probably spurious. As pointed out by Dr. R.G. Bhandarkar,⁴ it is not in the regular Chālukyan style . There is no invocation of the boar-incarnation in the beginning, and none of the princes mentioned in it receive any titles and birudas as in other genuine Chālukyan grants. In no other record of the Early Chālukyas, again, do we find such a wholesale borrowing from Katachchuri grants. This cannot be attributed to the Gujarat draftsman’s ignorance of the forms of Chālukyan records; for the earlier grants of Śryāśraya –Śīlāditya , which were drafted in Gujarat, are in the approved Chālukyan style Pandit Bhagvanlal supposed⁵ that Jayasimha might have conquered part of North Guja- rat and sent his son Buddhavarman to rule over it; but , as shown above, the donated village was situated in the Surat District in South Gujarat. We have, therefore, to suppose that Vijayarāja was ruling over South Gujarat for some time between 693 A. C., the last known date of Śryāśraya-Śīlāditya, and 731 A. C., the date of his brother Mańgalarasarāja. In that case this would be the only instance of the use of the Gupta era in South Gujarat; for, so far as our knowledge goes, the Kalachuri era was exclusively used in Gujarat down to the middle of the eight century A.C. It is again noteworthy that the present grant was found with two others of Dadda II at Kairā and that many of the donees mentioned in it figure also in the latter grants.6 It is therefore, not unlikely that it was forged in favour of the descendants of those Brāhmaņas by someone who was ignorant of the form of Chālukyan records.⁷ Its date 394 was intended to refer to the same era as the genuine Gurjara grants of K. 380 and K.385, and thus to correspond to 693 or 694 A. C., when the
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¹ Ibid., Vol. I, part i, p.110.
² Since then the beginning of Vikramāditya I’s reign has fixed in 654-55 A. C., Ep. Ind., Vol. IX, p. 102.
³ Above, Nos. 27 and 30.
⁴ E. H. D., pp. 77 f.
⁵ Bom. Gaz.,Vol.I, part i , p. 11o
⁶ As many as twelve names are common to the three grants, viz., Ādityaravi, Indraśūra and Īśvara of the Bharadvāja gōtra, Āvuka of the Dhūmrāyaņa gōtra,Bhaţţi and Drōna of the Dauņdakīya gōtra, Viśākha, Dhara and Nandin of the Māţhara gōtra, Dharmadhara of the Hārīta gōtra and Gōpāditya and Viśākha, of the Vatsa gōtra. Again,the following persons mentioned in the Chālukya and Gurjara grants respectively are probably identical: Tāpiśūra and Tāviśūra of the Bharadvāja gōtra Dāma and Dāmadhara of the Bharadvāja gōtra, Tāvīśarman and Tāpiśarman of the Daundakīya gōtra,Sēla and Śaila of the Kauņdinya gōtra, Vatraśarman and Vātaśarman of the Kauņdinya gōtra, Rāma and Rāmila of the Māţhara gōtra,
⁷ On the back of the plates there is a cancelled inscription, for which, see Dr. Fleet’s account in Ind. Ant., Vol.VII, PP, 251 ff. It contains the names of many donees figuring in the present record and has the Same date as the latter, but its opening words indicate that it purported to be granted like the spurious plates of Dadda II from the Vijaya-vikshēpa (victorious capital?) Nāndīpurī. It may have been realized after it was incised that the Chālukyas could not have ruled from Nāndīpurī in K.394 as the Gurjaras were in continuous occupation of the surrounding territory from at least K. 380 to K.486.So the inscription was cancelled and another written on the back of the plates. The writers of the two inscriptions were different persons, for the characters in which they are incised differ in certain respects as shown by Dr. Fleet (ibid., p. 251). For another reason conjectured by Dr. Fleet, see loc. cit., p. 253.