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No. 47.)
RECORDS OF THE SOMAVAMSI KINGS OF KATAK.
325
year, was edited by Babu Pratapachandra Ghosha, who, however, abstained from any 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 make any attempt to fix the date of the record.
And finally, D., another of the set of three charters issued by Mahf-Bhavagupta I. in his thirty-first year, was edited in 1882, in the Jour. Beng. As. Soo. 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 Baba Rangalala Banerjea as referring to the later Gupta kings of Magadha;" evidently, simply because, as he himself asserted (loc. cit. p. 10), without the alighteet foundation in fact for the second and third sasertions,"we know from the Aphead inscription " that there was a long line of Gupta kings "(... the Guptas of Magadha) "in Behår, and they "called themselves the lords of the three Kalingas, and that Bhavagupta was one of them." He misread the name of the king as Mahadevagupta,' and represented the person, whose existence he thus arrived at, as a grandson of Maha-Bhavagupta I. himself. Taking an expression, towards the end of the record, which describes Maha-Bhavagapta I. as a very god Kandarpa (Kámadêva) 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 Sastras enjoin that sovereign kings only had the power of granting land in perpetuity, he arrived at the conclusion that the donor was ostensibly Maharaja Mahadevagapta, son of Sivagupta, but really & petty "chief of Kobala, of the name of Kandarpadêve, who, not being himself competent, according to "the Smțiti, 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 Yayati, the alleged founder of the Kesari dynasty according to the local annals, and in making him a contemporary of Mahl-Sivagapte. And he placed the supposed Mahadevagupta, 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.; vis. that Janamêjays and Yayati were Maha-Bhavagupta I. and Mahl-Sivagupta 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 Janamējaya, for instance, issuing charter A., had all the essential part of it worded as if it were issued by a totally different person, vis. his supposed paramount sovereign Maha-Bhavagupta I. And the third is the blind acceptance of the local annals, and of the period which they purport to establish for Yayati, the alleged founder of the Kesari dynasty.
As regards the last of these mistakes, -it should surely be almost unnecessary 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 Yayati-Kesari, 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 Kesari-Vamsa, 473 A.D., prior to “which the accounts are so replete with obvions falsehoods, contradiction, inconsistency, and "anachronism, as to be equally unintelligible and unworthy of notice" (Asiatic Researches, VOL XV. p. 256). But he showed no reasons for this differentiation, which was plainly based oa
But the Aphead inscription (Gupta Insoriptions, p. 200), and the other records of the same family id. pp. 208, 211, 213), make no mention whatever of the Kalinga country, and contain no such dame u Bhavagapta, which, in fact, does not occur in any record known to me, apart from these Katak oharters. And the angerted details sro not even to be found in Dr. Rajendralala Mitra's own rendering of the Aphead record (Jour. Bong. As. Soc. Vol. XXXV. Part I. p. 267).- I suppose ho was thinking of Madhavagupta, who was one of the Guptas of Magadha.
