________________
186
MEDIÆVAL JAINISM uņda Rāya. Whilc narrating the history of the great image which that Minister-General had caused to be built, it was said that the Emperor Bharata, the son of Purudeva, caused to be made near Paudanapura an image of 525 bows in length, resembling the form of the victorious-armed Bāhubali-kevaļi ; •that after a lapse of time, a world-terrifying mass of innumerable kukkuțasarpas grew around it ; and that Cāmunda Rāya, on being advised that that place was inaccessible, determined to construct another image of similar proportions at Sravaņa Belgoļa.!
The Paudanapura mentioned here could have been no other than Podan, modern Bodhan, a village lying in Lat. 18° 40' and Long. 77° 53' in the Nizāmabād district of H. E. H. the Nizam's Dominions. It was the capital of the Rāşçrakūta ruler Indravallabha, Nityavarşa, Indra IV. (A.D. 915--A.D. 917). This village is now strewn with an array of antiquitics, both Jaina and Brahmanical, which undoubtedly go to prove the antiquity of the place.” This fact of its having been the capital of the Rāşțrakūta king in the first quarter of the tenth century A.D., and the fact that in one of the Śravaņa Belgoļa inscriptions it is said to have contained an image of Gommateśvara, suggest that long before the days of king Indravallabha, it had already come into prominence as a great Jaina centre. But in the reign of that Rāştrakūta king, a Vaişņavite temple was built there.3 Perhaps it is this fact of the rājadhāni of Bodhana having completely passed into the hands of non-Jainas, which explains why in the same age Cāmunda Rāya was informed that it was “an inaccessible" place.
1. E. C. II, 234, p. 98 op. cit.
2 & 3. Narsimhacarya, Hyderabad Archäological Series, No. 7, pp. 1, 4, Seq.
