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270/The Raṣṭrakūtas and Jainism
based on a genuine copper-plate charter, is an authentic copy of it in every detail. Excepting the Kaḍaba grant of Prabhutavarsha (Govinda III.) the form of which is altogether peculiar, the earlier Sanskrit copper-plate inscriptions of the Raṣṭrakūṭas of the main line, from the Sāmāngad plates of Dantidurga to the Nausāri plates of Indrarāja III. of Saka-Samvat 836, all commence with the verse Sa võ=vyād=vidhasa dhama; and as that verse is found also in Amōghavarsha's own Śirur inscription, I should have expected the present inscription also to begin with it, and might well fancy that the Jaina copyists substituted for it a verse referring to their own creed.
The person with whom our inscription is chiefly concerned, is Bankēśa or, as the name also is written, Bankeya, or Bankēyarāja, by Amōghavarsha's favour in the enjoyment of, or governing, thirty-thousand villages the most important of which was Vanavāsi (verse 21). As reported by Dr. Fleet, an unpublished inscription at Nidagundi in the Dharwar district mentions, as a feudatory of Amōghavarsha I., Bankeyarasa, governor of the Banavasi twelve-thousand, the Belgali three-hundred, the Kundarage seventy, the Kundur five-hundred, and the Purigere three-hundred, who apparently is the same personage. According to our inscription, Bankeśa alias Sella-Kētana was the son of Adhōra (or Ādhōra), proprietor of Kolanūra, and his wife Vijayānkā, and grandson of Erakōri, of the Mukula family (kula; vv. 17-19). The name Bankeśa (or Bankeya) together with the biruda Sellakētana identify his with the Chellaketana, whose son Lōkāditya alias Chellapatāka (the younger brother of Chelladhvaja), of the Makula kula, in A. D. 897 was governing the Vanavāsa country at Bankapura, so named by his father after his own name (Bankēśa); and there can therefore be hardly any doubt that the date of our inscription (in A. D. 860) may give us a true date for the time
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