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SEPTEMBER, 1928)
MARARASTRA AND KANNADA
195
black soil tract in Dharwår district, Bombay presidency. He suggests karu-nddua or the high country, as the Karnatak was, unlike the southern Dravidian tracta, situated on high land : and the suggestion seems perfectly sound.
In its Sanskritised form, Karnata, the word is found in the Mahabharata and may be as old as the third century B.C. (Narayana Rao, ibid., p. 492). But we have no poaitive evidence as to the date. The high country stretches from the Kannada country to the Narmada, and in fact geographically the term Kannada might be applied to exactly the same area as that to which the name Maharastra was applied. Now karu means not only "tall but "great" (Kittel, Kanarese Dictionary) and it seems highly probable that the Prakrit-speaking inhabitants of the North of the Deccan highlands simply translated the words karu nadu into Mabáratta or Mårattha to designate the area from which they came. The Andhra empire, which in circa B.c. 239 extended to the Narmada, may have popularised the use of the term and have stabilized its Sanskrit form Maharastra
It may be asked why the Highlanders did not use the term Kannada as Sanskritized into Karnata. But there is no evidence that the word was ever applied to the area of Maharåstra. It is argued only that the Dravidians talked of highlands as karu nadu and translated this idea into Prakrit. Kanarese was spoken as far north as the river Godavari in the ninth century A.D. (Nrpatunga's Kavirdjamdryga, Ed. Patna, p. 12), but this is only evidence of the survival of a Dravidian form of speech in those parts and not of the name of the tract. Further the rattas, raffikas and rastrakúlas are not accounted for. I believe that the word means district,' a ruler of a district or tract-just like bhojaha, which clearly means a large landlord, or petienilla, which means apparently a ruler of a peth or pattan, & market-town. Rastrakuța, again, seems merely to mean lord of a tract, just as rastrapati in the inscriptions means district officer (Bom. Gaz., vol., pt. 1, p. 82) and gramakúfa means village headman (ibid. and Kaut., Arthasástra, book IV, ch. IV, suppression of wicked). The view of the Bombay Gazetteer seems correct, and I would not attempt to assign to rastra the meaning of des in the rostricted sense—the uplands of Maharastra.
Again, there is the mention of the three Mahåråştrahas (Kane, ibid., p. 622). They are mentioned in the Aihole inscription of 634 A.D. These three tracts were a 99,000 (village) area and did not cover the area of the 7 lakh Dakşiņa påtha (Kane, ibid. 620) or the 71 lakh Rattapâdit (ibid., 633). They must denote three upland tracts divided by valleys or plains. Mr. Kane assigns these three tracts to Vidarbha (Berar), Mahåråstra proper (Khandesh to Satara) and Kurtala (Sholapur, Kolhapur and the modern Karnatak), and his view may be accepted. It may be pointed out that the meaning highlands' for Maharastra is here more appropriate than great kingdom.' Although a ruler might claim to be king of the three great king. doms, the term could hardly be used as a description, while the expression king of the three highlands' would be sufficiently descriptive.
Another difficulty that arises is the restriction of the term Maharastra by, say, the tenth century to the west of the peninsula. 'Chis I attribute to the rise of the Vidarbha kingdom after the fall of the Andhras (A.D. 225) and again after the death of Harga (A.D. 147). It was a prominent kingdom (Kane, ibid, p. 642) and would decline to be included in Maharastra. Moreover, the term seems to have early acquired (like Kannada) linguistic
9 The form Karunadam is used for the language, and Karunddar for the people in the Tamil glasice. The giving of names from the physical feature of colour seems common in Tamil, cf. Sengod=red hill, etc.-8.K.
4 The limit of Kannada land when the Tamils gave them the name was past the plateau of Mysore in the north and began where the country slopes down from the Plates of Mysore. The region of the Asoks inscriptions in Mysoro was the Vadugarmunai or the Vaduga (Kan. Badaga) frontier.-S.K.
5. Vincent Smith, Oxford History, 1923, p. 119.
• But see Bombay Gazetteer, vol. I, pt. I, p. 133, n. 2. The term Karpata was used for Calukyas of Kalyan, in A.D. 1000.
* This appears to be dorived from napa and Kanarose or Tamil pddi, settlement or place the Rattan village, Tho root is padu, to sit down. Pafe is variant (Kittel, Kanarees Dict.).
