________________
The Voice for a Golden Past
P. B. Desai/Jainism in South India Jaina Samskriti Samrakshaka Sangha/
Solapur/1957/pp.102-03.
Bodhan is the headquarter of a tāluka of the name in the Nizamabad Dt. It contains a large number of ancient sculptures, inscriptions and other antiquities. The inscriptions are in Kannada and belong to the regime of the Western Calukyas of Kalyana. An inscription of Trilokyamalla or Somesvara 1, dated in A.D. 1056, informs us that Bodhan was the capital of Rastrakuta emperor Indravallabha who may be identified with Nityavarsa Indra III (A.D. 913-22). The mosque known by the significant name Deval Masjid here must have been originally a Jaina temple. This fact is evident from its pillars bearing the figures of Tirthankaras carved on them. A damaged epigraph of the reign of Vikramaditya VI found at the Bellal Tank, registers the grant of certain lands and dues to the teacher Municandra Siddhantadeva for the benefit of a Jaina temple. 1
But this is only a fringe of the later history of the place the beginnings of which penetrate into the hoary antiquity of several centuries before the Christian era. To trace its early history some material is available in the Buddhist, Jaina and Brahmanical literature. In the inscriptions at Bodhan noticed above, the place has been mentioned as Bodhana, which form of the name is also found in modern usage. The ancient name of the place was Podana ; and the identity of Podana with Bodana does not rest on conjecture. In the Kannada Pampā Bharata, it is stated that Yuddhamalla I, the early ancestor of the poet's patron Arikesari II, indulged in the bathing ceremony of five hundred elephants every day at Bodana which, from the manner of the description in the passage, appears to have been the capital of Yuddhamalla I. The same incident is related in almost identical pharases in the Vemulavada pillar inscription and Parabhani copper plate charter, which are composed in Sanskrit. In these two records the word Podana is substituted for Bodana, establishing the identity of both.
1 Hyderabad Archaeological Series, no. 7. 2 The history of this identification is interesting. In the article entitled 'Arikesari
and Pampa' (Pracina Karnataka, April, 1933), the present writer established the identity by citing the parallel passages. M. Govinda Pai arrived at the same conclusion independently in his article, “Pampa : His Country and Time', published in the Kannada journal Bharati, September, 1933. In his Mediaeval Jainism (p. 186) Dr. B.A. Saletore proceeds with the identification, but does not go into the details,
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