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SUMMARY OF RESULTS FOR THE GUPTA ERA.
DECEMBER, 1888.]
dated their records in it. And the only difficulty then remaining would be,-When Chandragupta I. and his descendants had asserted themselves as independent sovereigns, by rebellion against their masters, why should they continue to use a purely dynastic era, which had only been running for a short time and had certainly not become an astronomical era, and which would always remind them of the originally subordinate status of their ancestors; instead of establishing a new era of their own, or instead of adopting some well-known era, of general use, which could evoke no reminiscence of a humiliating kind P44 The Early Gupta records, however, throw no light on this point; nor can we expect any, unless we obtain inscriptions of the time of the Mahúrájas Gupta and Ghatôtkacha, or of the early years of Chandragupta I. And at present, in connection with India itself, we know of no king the commencement of whose reign can with any certainty be referred to A.D. 320; and of no historical event to which we can safely allot that date. Nor, while the Early Gupta sovereignty continued, is there any indication of the Gupta era having been used in India by any other independent dynasty. The nearest approximation to the year in question that we have, is in the case of the Kalachuri dynasty of Central India; in respect of which certain points in the records of the Parivrâjaka Maharajas and the Maharajas of Uchchakalpa do tend to support the actual existence, in the Early Gupta period, of a Kalachuri era, and, consequently, of Kalachuri kings under some earlier name.45 The Kalachuri dates, however, certainly cannot be referred to the Gupta epoch. And circumstances indicate that the dominion of the Kalachuri kings at that time was confined entirely to the more eastern parts of Central India; so that they were only contemporaries of the northern dynasty of which the Early Guptas were at first the servants. Mr. Fergusson's opinion,48 again, was in the direction of the era being established, with the foundation of Valabhi as a new capital of Western India, by
An objection of this sort does not apply to the use of the Gupta era by the Valabhi family. The Senapati Bhatarka drove out the invaders who had overthrown the Gupta sovereignty in Western India; and may possibly have been himself the feudatory of some descendant of the original Gupta stock. And when Dharasêna IV. became a paramount sovereign, it was on the disruption of the
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the Andhra king Gôtamiputra, whom he placed47 between A.D. 312 and 333; the Mahárája Gupta being a fendatory of him or of one of his immediate successors. But the chronology of the Andhras,-who, at the best, seem to have been too essentially a western and southern dynasty to be concerned in any leading way with the history of Northern India,still remains to be finally determined. And Dr. R. G. Bhandarkar, who has given more consideration to the subject than anyone else as yet, places Gôtamiputra about two centuries earlier, 48 in the period A.D. 133 to 154; and, according to his view of the early chronology, we should have to refer the establishment of the Gupta era to some event connected with either the downfall of the Kshatrapas of Saurashtra or the history of the Rashtrakutas of the Dekkan. The Kshatrapas, however, certainly did not use the Gupta era; and there is not the slightest particle of evidence that the Râshtrakûtas ever had an era of their own. There can be but little doubt that the real paramount lords of the Maharajas Gupta and Ghatotkacha, and at first of Chandragupta I. himself, were some of the later Indo-Scythian kings of Northern India, whose duration is certain at any rate up to the time of Samudragupta. These IndoScythian kings must have used the Saka era. But this era, again, had not then become an astronomical era ;49 and there was, therefore, no special inducement for the Early Guptas to adopt it; but, on the contrary, there was an objection of the kind already indicated. Further, the Vikrama era was not an astronomical era; and the use of it, in those days, under the name of the Malava era, was probably confined to the different sections of the Mâlava tribe, and to territories of which no part was brought under the Early Gupta sway until the time of Samudragupta. And, finally, the Kaliyuga era in all probability was used only by the astronomers of Ujjain for purely technical purposes; and was not known at all in the territories in which the Early Guptas first rose to power. In fact, in India itself there was no already existing era which
Kanauj kingdom. At neither point was there any reason for the members of this family to feel any aversion to the Gupta era. 45 See page 831 above, note 1. Jour. R. As. Soc. N. S., Vol. IV. p. 128 f. 47 id. p. 122.
18 Early History of the Dekkan, p. 27. 49 See page 209 above.
