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JULY, 1910.]
THREE COPPER-PLATE GRANTS FROM EAST BENGAL.
209
It may be further suggested, Dr. Hoernle thinks, that the termination assigned above to Dbarmāditya's reign, namely A.D. 568, Deed not mean that he died then, but would imply simply that his sovereignty in this extreme eastern province came to an end then, while he may have continued to reign over the remainder of his territories. Yasodharman's wide empire began to break up towards the close of his reign, and the outlying provinces would naturally have been lost first. Gopacandra may thus have wrested this eastern province from the empire, and established his independent sway over it many years before the time when Yasodbarman alias Dharmāditya actually died.
GENERAL BEMARKS.
Topography. The first point that calls for notice is the mandala or province in which these grants were made. It is clearly named Vāraks in plates A and B 60 and in the seals attached to all the plates, and reads Vāruka in plate 0. Varaka was no doubt the correct name. This is an entirely new name of which nothing was known before, and it has left no modern representative. Perhaps it may be connected with the modern Barind, that is, Barendra, Sanskrit Varendra, which denotes a tract of high ground of stiff red clay lying east and wost across the middle of North Bengal. Varendra, which literally means " lord of Vara," no doubt signified the " noblest portion of Vara," because at the present day in North Bengal the words barindra and barind denote also (1) high ground not submerged in the floods during the rainy season, and (2) main land, as distinguished from alluvial formations. What dara (or perhaps vāra ) meant it is difficult to say, because it is probably an indigenous word Sanskritized. Presumably it denoted some kind of country, perhaps all the alluvial lands and islands of the Ganges delta; see the remarks below. Varaka, as a natural derivative from it, might easily have been given as the name to the province comprising all those lands and islands. If this were so, Varendra would have appropriately denoted the high tract bounding the vara on the north.
The main stream of the Ganges, which now joins the Brahmaputra, the ancient Lohita, at the north of the Faridpur District, where these grants were found, must at that time have been rather one of the large streams in the western or middle part of the delta. In those days the Brahmaputra, after leaving Assam, turned eastward under the Garo hills, passed round east of Daoca, and so found its way into the sea ; and its mouth must have been praotically the same as at present, namely, the Meghna. There would thus have been a large region between the main stream or streams) of the Ganges on the weat, the Brahmaputra on the east, and the ses on the south, its northern limit was probably the Barind. That region no doubt constituted the mandala or province of Vārska,61
The province thus consisted of the delta formed by the Ganges and the River Karatoya (the modern Kurattee) and other rivers from North Bengal. At the present time the delta has been largely filled up with the immense quantities of earth washed down by all those rivers and also by the Brahmaputra, and many of the rivers themselves have become narrowed and mach blocked with silt. But at the time of these grants, they must have been wider and more powerful streams, and must in the southerly part of their courses have been estuaries rather than ordinary rivers. The southern belt of the delta was no doubt then, just as now, covered with dense forest more or less swampy.
· So also in the fourth plate (Heo'p. 198). a It agrees no doubt with the region Samatata in Cunningham's Ancient Geography of India, P. 501
