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TRIBES IN ANCIENT INDIA
Having killed a tiger which had become a terror to the city of Paundravardhana, he came to the notice of the king who ruled there, one Jayanta. Jayanta gave him his daughter in marriage, and Jayāpīda is then said to have subdued five kings of the Gauda country (which probably meant the major portion of the province of Bengal with Monghyr and Bhagalpur of the province of Bihar) on behalf of his father-in-law, and then returned to Kāśmir in triumph with his bride. The whole story reads more as fiction than history, and serious criticism has doubted its authenticity.
The Gaudas are twice mentioned in Rājasekhara's Kāvyamīmāmsā, where it is said that they spoke Sanskrit, but could not speak Prākrit well (Chap. X, p. 57; Chap. 7, p. 33).
The Pala kings of Bengal are often described as “Lords of Gauda' (Gaudendra or Gaudeśvara) as well as 'Vangapati', in the contemporary epigraphic records of the ninth century A.D. Dharmapala and Devapāla had often to measure swords with the Gurjara Pratihāras on the one hand and the Rāstrakūtas on the other. Thus the Rādhanpur plates of Rāstrakūta Govinda III (Ep. Ind., VI, p. 248) as well as the Wani grant of the same monarch refer to a defeat inflicted by the Rāstrakūta king Dhruva upon Vatsarāja, the Gurjara king, who had already defeated the king of Gauda. The Sanjan Copperplate of Amoghavarşa I tells us that Dhruva took away the white umbrellas of the king of Gauda, which were destroyed between the Ganges and the Jumna (Ind. Ant., Vol. XII, p. 159). That Dhruva actually advanced so far is also proved by a verse in the Baroda plates of Kakkarāja. This proves almost conclusively that the kingdom of Gauda in the ninth century stretched at least as far as Allahabad at the confluence of the Ganges; and Vatsarāja's son Nāgabhata is stated in the Gwalior Inscription of Bhoja to have defeated the king of Bengal (c. 810 A.D.). The Jodhpur Inscription of Bauka informs us that his father Kakka 'gained renown by fighting with the Gaudas at Madgagiri (or Monghyr)' (Majumdar, Gurjara Pratihāras, p. 60). The Sirur and Nilgund Inscriptions (Ép. Ind., Vol. VI) of Amoghavarşa I (866 A.D.) refer to the Rāstrakūta Govinda III, who imprisoned not only the Keralas and Mālavas, but also the Gaudas, whose king at that time was Devapāla who is described in the Garuda Pillar Inscription of Badal (Ep. Ind., Vol. II, pp. 16off.) as the Lord of Gauda. It was probably during the reign of Devapāla's grandson
1 Stein, Chronicles of the Kings of Kāsmīr, Vol. I, p. 94. But the romantic tale of his visit incognito to the capital of Paundravardhana, then the seat of government of a king named Jayanta, unknown to sober history, seems to be purely imaginary' (Smith, Early History of India, 4th Ed., p. 387).
