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No. 19.]
THE SIRPUR STONE INSCRIPTION.
189
unable to share this view. The question has already been discussed by other scholars, and the identification of Yayatinagara with the modern Jajpur has been suggested, but Dr. Fleet has pointed out that this suggestion is untenable as the inscriptions distinctly imply that Yayātinagara was on the Mahanadi, whereas Jájpar is only on the Vaitarani, about 50 miles away from the former river.
The name Yayatinagara was apparently imposed upon Vinitapara during the reign of Yayati otherwise known as Mahasivagupta. It is noteworthy that prior to his time the name Yayatinagara does not occur in any inscriptions. In fact he himself used the older Dame Vinītapara in the records of the 8th and 9th years of his reign, which fact shows that till then the idea of naming the town after himself had not occurred to him. It was probably somewhere between the 15th and 24th year of his reign that the town changed its name. Since then the official name seems to have become Yayatinagara, and we have in all four inscriptions mentioning it, two of which belong to the 24th and 28th years of his own reign, and two to the 3rd and 13th year of his son's. This name apparently continued to be used as long as Vinitapura was the capital, at least in official circles, but as is well known the original name usually sticks 80 persistently in the popular mind that it is difficult to eradicate it. Many a monarch has endeavoured to change the names of big cities after his own, but the old name has usually asserted the ground, and I suppose the same happened with Vinitapura, which name can now be traced in the corrupted form Binka. This is a small town in the Sonpur State, 16 miles north of the present capital of that state. It fulfils all the conditions appertaining to Vinitapura. It is on the bank of the Mahanadi, and the river scenery there is as beautiful as described in the inscriptions. From Sirpur it is about 100 miles as the crow flies and about 180 by river- quite a safe distance to which the ousted family might have removed itself. The two places are so situated that if one fled straight to the east he would meet Binkā as the first place on the Mahanadi, as between these two places the river flows in a ourse. Binká, moreover, is central to all the camps from which the kings issued their charters. Of the 13 so far discovered, 5 were issued from the capital itself, 3 from a pleasure garden, which must have been somewhere in the big groves still to be seen on the outskirts of Binka, 3 were issued from Mūrasīma or the present Mursingā in the Patná state, about 11 miles from Binka, one from Sonpur, and one from Vämaņdāpāti* or Bämrå, 60 miles to the north-east, but this last was issued by a feudatory from his own headquarters, and he has mentioned his overlord's capital as Yayātinagara. The villages granted 80 far as they have been identified are situated close to and round about Binkä as a glance on the accompanying map will show. The existence of a village named Rajpali (meaning royal hamlet) within a mile of the present Bink, town is significant. There are also remains of a fort close by and a gbåt embankment on the Mahanadi.
See above, Vol. VIII. p. 189 (where Professor Hultzsch prefers to take kataka iu the sense of a camp') and J. 4. 8. B., 1905, Vol. I., PP. 2 and 3.
. Above, Vol. III. p. 356.
1 My idea is that when Bālärjuna's successor was driven out from Sirpur he fled straight off to the east and settled at & spot where he first met the sacred Mahanadi whose waters had sanctified generations of his ancestors. To this obscure place he in his dejection gave the appropriate name of Vinitapura or the town of the humbled.' I feel this is rather fanciful, as at this distance of time it is difficult to read the motives which actuated the founder to name the town in that way, and all that can be said is, that the explanation is plausible.
• It may be noted that Bāmrā is still called Bāmaņda by the Oriya people of Sambalpur.
It is remarkable that there are amongst the donees Brabmaņa immigrants from Madhyadõsa and even distant Srávasti in Oudh. Their advent to this remote place may easily be explained by the fact that Binkä lay, as it does now, on the high road to Jagannath Puri, one of the four drāmas or the most sacred places of India, which Hindus from all corners of the country visited as they still continue to do. Some of these learned Pandits of the celebrated district of Srävasti might have been induced to settle there, either by solicitations of the king or by necessity owing to the difficulty of crossing long distances for want of good communications, accentuated by the dangers of the road which was infested by robbers of all description.
