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330 EPIGRAPHIA INDICA
(VOL. XXXII Of the writing on the reverse, the central slanting line of jya is not clearly made, while the left part of the figure for 1 is cut off. These writings no doubt quote the date of the issue of the coin under study, the obverse giving Saka-sa (i.e. Saka-samvatsarē) 1411 and the reverse rājya (i.e. rājyasarvatsarē) 15, i.e. the regnal year 15. Thus the coin was issued by king Bhairavasimha of Tirabhukti (i.e. Tirhut or Mithila, i.e. North Bibar), who was the son of king Darpanārāyana, in the 15th year of his reign, which corresponded to Saka 1411 or 1489-90 A. D. Bhairavasinha thus ascended the throne of Tirhut about Saka 1397 or 1475-76 A.D.
There is no doubt that the king who issued the coin under study is identical with Bhairavasimha alias Rupanārāyana alias Harinārāyaṇa who was the son of Narasimha Darpanārāyaṇa of the Oinvār dynasty of Tirhut, which flourished in the period between the middle of the 14th to the first half of the 16th century A.D. The coin is the only one of Bhairavasimha so far discovered and one of the very few of the Oinvārs as yet published. As a matter of fact, very few of the Oinvār rulers issued coins. Our coin throws some light on the rather obscure history of the king as well as of the local ruling family of medieval India, to which he belonged.
The history of the rulers of the Oinvār dynasty of Tirhut is little known and their chronology full of confusion. The confusion is due to many factors such as the uncertainty about the initial year of the Lakshmanesina Sarvat or La. Sam. used in the dating of many of the literary records of the period and tract in question, the possibility of contemporaneous or conjoint rule for some years of the predecessor and successor in several cases, and the unreliability of some of the local traditions. Since the late medieval period, the La. Sam. is calculated as starting from 1119 A.D.; but as regards the earlier dates the initial year varies between 1108 and 1119 A.D. For the sake of convenience, we have tentatively taken 1119 A.D. as the starting point of the era in our calculations in the following pages. Another great difficulty is that even when the La. Sam. year is mentioned together with the corresponding Saka year and verifiable astronomical details are provided for a date, they are generally irregular according to Swamikannu Pillai's Indian Ephemeris, This is evidently due to the fact that the local almanacs from which the dates were quoted, were based on a defective calculation.
In the following lines, we are offering a sketch of Oinvār history and chronology on the basis of the following works: (1) M.M. Chakravarti, History of Mithilä during the Pre-Mughal Period (JASB, N.S., Vol. XI, 1915, pp. 406-433 ; especially pp. 415-33); (2) R. K. Choudhary, The Oinwäras of Mithila (JBRS, Vol. XL, pr. 99-121); (3) J. Eggeling, Catalogue of Sanskrit Mamuscripts in the Library of the India Office, Part IV, pp. 874-76, No. 2564 ; (4) G. A. Grierson, (a) Vidyāpati and his Contemporaries (Ind. Ant., Vol. XIV, 1885, pp. 182 ff.); (6) On some Medieval Kings of Mithila (ibid., Vol. XVIII, 1899, pp. 57-58); (c) An Introduction to Maithili Language ; (5) S. N. Singh, History of Tirhut, 1915; and (6) U. Thakur, History of Mithila, 1956, Chapter VI: The Oinavāras (pp. 290-339).
Harisimha, the last ruler of the Karnata dynasty of Mithilā, was overthrown by Sultan Ghiyāsuddin Tughluk Shāh (1320-25 A.D.) of Delhi about 1324 A.D. Sometime later, about the middle of the fourteenth century, a Brāhmaṇa named Kāmēsvara Thākur, who may have originally been the Rājapandita at Harisimha's court, obtained the Zamindari of a considerable part of the country from Sultan Firüz Shāh (1351-87 A.D.). The dynasty founded by the Brāhmaņa is called Oinavāra (Oinivāra) or Oinvår after the village of Dini in the Muzaffarpur District, which one of his ancestors received from a Karņāța king. The family is soinetimes also named after
1 Hjat. Beng., Dacca University, Vol. I, pp. 233 ff, * I. Prasad, Hist. Med. Ind., p. 266.
