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EPIGRAPHIA INDICA
[VOL. XXXIII containing the name of the donor at the beginning of line 2 seems to read ōdhabhanjēna.. If it may be believed that the letters Srima are broken away from the end of the previous line, wy suggest Srimat-Todhabhanjena and in that case the name of the donor may be Todhabhañja even if it sounds rather peculiar. But it is equally possible that one or two of the letters broken at the end of the previous line actually formed a part of the donor's name. Strangely enough Pandit Rajaguru finds a stanza in the Anushṭubh metre in the inscription, the first half of which is read as Maḍārdā-vishaye ti(t)rē Sa (Sa)trubhañjēna dataḥ(tta) [taḥ [*] while the third foot is supposed to read Lilēsabhadra Durgāyā, the first five syllables at the end of line 2 and the remaining three at the beginning of line 3. His translation of the record runs as follows: "This grant is made on the border of the Maḍārdā vishaya by Satrubhañja in favour of Līlēśabhadra Durga (in perpetuity) as long as the sun and the moon exist." Unfortunately both the reading and the interpretation are in most part imaginary and unwarranted. It is impossible to read the names Satrubhañja and Līlēšabhadra in the inscription, while the emendation dattataḥ is quite meaningless in the context. The translation' on the border of the Madarda vishaya' of what has been wrongly read as Madarda-vishaye ti(ti)rë is equally unsound. Moreover, it would involve the impossible suggestion that the inscribed stone, raised on the border of a district, was granted in favour of a goddess. In case a plot of land on the border of the district was meant to be the object of the grant, it is impossible to believe that the record gives only its location without any other details. Indeed there is scarcely any such instance in the whole range of Indian epigraphy. Pandit Rajaguru fails to notice that a few letters are lost at the end of lines 1 and 2 and that the record is in prose. The fact that his interpretation leaves it uncertain as to what the gift really was renders both his reading and translation of the inscription unacceptable.
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The importance of the inscriptions lies in the fact that they mention three rulers, apparently petty chiefs of the Mayurbhanj region, who dourished about the 10th century A.D. The same area was under the rule of the Atli-Bhañjas of Khijjinga-kōṭṭa from about the beginning of the eleventh century. Some of the earliest records of this family, which originally owed allegiance to the Imperial Bhauma-Karas of Orissa, bear dates in the Bhauma-Kara era. This era seems to have started from 831 A.D. The dates in this era found in the inscriptions of the Adi-Bhanjas have been read as the years 288 and 293; but, as we have tried to show elsewhere, the intended reading of the symbol taken to be 200 is really 100. Thus these dates actually stand for 188 and 193 respectively and therefore they appear to correspond to 1019 and 1024 A.D. The three rulers mentioned in the records under study appear to have flourished sometime before these dates apparently as feudatories of the Bhauma-Karas.
It seems that the Bhanja ruler mentioned in No. 3 of our inscriptions belonged to a branch of the Bhanja family of Khijjinga-kōṭṭa; since, however, his name is not mentioned in the records of the family among its earlier rulers, we may suggest that the branch represented by the Bhanja ruler of our inscription was overthrown by the Adi-Bhañja dynasty known from inscriptions. That the Bhanjas of Khijjinga-kōṭṭa called themselves Adi-Bhanja or Original Bhanja' would suggest that there was at least another (probably, earlier) Bhañja ruling family in the area, which was regarded by them as of a more recent origin than their own dynasty and may have been overthrown by them. It also seems that kings Dhruvaraja and Kumāravarmaraja belonged to a dynasty that flourished in the region before the rise of the Bhañjas. This dynasty appears to have been overthrown by the Bhanja family represented by the Bhañja ruler mentioned in No. 3 of our inscriptions.
1 Above, Vol. XXX, p. 221. Cf. IHQ, Vol. XXIX, p. 150; Bhandarkar's List, No. 1487; above, Vol. XXV,
p. 167.
Above, Vol. XXIX, p. 191, note 2.
Ibid., p. 184; of. Vol. XXVII, p. 327, note 1.
