Jignasa Journal Of History Of Ideas And Culture Part 01

Author(s): Vibha Upadhyaya and Others
Publisher: University of Rajasthan

Page 157

Vākāțaka Historiography as seen in the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century / 119
Guptas and that he contracted the matrimonial alliance in order to stem the tide of Gupta advance towards the Deccan."31 He also accepts the possibility that the Guptas received considerable help from the Vākāțakas against the sakas.32
VII In 1955 K. A. Nilakantha Šāstri gave a brief history of the Vākātakas in his A History of South India.33 Both in respect of chronology and history he broadly followed the outline of Altekar. For example, he believed that Rudrasena I was helped by Bhavanāga in his internal troubles, that the conquests of Samudragupta did not affect the Vākātakas, that the Guptas contracted matrimonial alliance with the Vākātakas to strengthen the Gupta position and execution of their plans against the Saka's, that Prabhāvatiguptā gave considerable help to her father in the Saka war, and so on. 34
VIII In 1957, V. V. Mirāshi produced his Marathi work entitled Vākāțaka Nrpati äņi Tyāmcha Kala of which an enlarged English version was published in 1963 under the title Inscriptions of the Vākāțakas (Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum, Vol. V). Mirashi's Corpus represented the cream of his deep study of the Väkātaka history and epigraphy. In it he has given a brilliant study of twenty-seven Vākātaka epigraphs along with a detailed introduction containing the political and cultural history of the dynasty. The scheme of the Vākäțaka chronology as given by Mirashis generally agrees with that which is fixed by Altekar and differs from the one suggested by Majumdār and Sircar. Mirashi was opposed to Jayaswal's suggestion that the Vākāțakas were a north Indian dynasty and tried to prove that their original home lay in southern India. On the Vākātaka-Gupta relations his views are nearer to those of Altekar. According to him, as a result of the conquests of Samudragupta in the eastern Deccan Rudrasenal's kingdom came to be confined to northern Vidarbha which lay between the Narmadā and the Vindhyādri range. As Mirashi puts it :
Though Rudrasena l's kingdom was thus much reduced in size, he maintained his independence and did not submit to the mighty Gupta Emperor. Perhaps Samudragupta, like Alexander, grew wiser by the resistance he encountered in his southern campaign. and avoided a direct conflict with the Vākāțaka king. He may also have thought it prudent to have friendly relations with his southern neighbour who occupied a strategic position with regard to the kingdom of the powerful Western Kshatrapas, whom he had not yet subdued. In any case, there are no signs of Gupta supremacy in the Vākāțaka
records of the age.36 Mirăshi also agreed with the view originally propounded by Smith that Chandragupta II had sought the alliance of the Väkātakas against the Western Ksatrapas and cemented it by giving his daughter Prabhāvatīguptā in marriage to the Vākāțaka prince Rudrasena II. The combined strength of the Guptas and the Vākātakas was sufficient to wipe out the Western Ksatrapas. On the history of Prabhāvatigupta's regency, the reign of Pravarasena II and his successors as well as the history of the Basim branch his views differ from those of Altekar only slightly. However, he has tried to show that Dandin's Dasakumāracharita appears to have preserved a living tradition about the last period of Vākātaka rule."37
IX In 1967 S. R. Goyal critically examined the Gupta-Vākātaka relations in his celebrated doctoral work entitled A History of the Imperial Guptas. In 1969 he produced another work in Hindi entitled