Indian Epigraphy c15.t6.48

c15.t6.48

When Alexander invaded India in the 4th century B.C., the Mālava (Malloi) tribe lived on the Ravi in the Punjab which was under Scytho-Parthian domination in the 1st century B.C. and the 1st century A.D. Owing probably to foreign pressure, the Mālavas moved towards Rajasthan where their existence is proved by an inscription² of Ṛṣabhadatta (c. 119-23 A.D.) and by the discovery of thousands of coins with the legend *Mālavānāṁ jayaḥ* at Nagar (ancient Mālava-nagara)³ in the former Jaipur State.⁴ The Mālavas must have also later settled in the ancient *janapadas* of Avanti and Ākara which came to be known as Mālava by the 7th century A.D. It is possible to suggest that the Mālava Republic was subjugated by the early Guptas in the 4th century A.D. and that the Aulikara family which enjoyed the viceregal position in Malwa under the Imperial Guptas, but which used the Kṛta and not the Gupta era, was a Mālava family. Thus it appears that the Mālava tribe carried the Kṛta or Scytho-Parthian era to Rajasthan and Malwa from their original home in the Punjab. When the memory of the Mālava tribe and its Republic was dimmed and the name Mālava only indicated a particular *janapada*, the era came to be associated with the Mālava country or with the king or kings of Mālava. The whole of the Malwa region was annexed to the Gupta empire by Candragupta II Vikramāditya (376-414 A.D.) who extirpated the Śakas of Western India about the end of the 4th century. From this time, Ujjayinī in Malwa became a secondary capital of the Gupta emperors and Candragupta II gradually became famous in Indian tradition and folk-lore as Vikramāditya Śakāri, the lord of Ujjayinī, even though the achievements of other Vikramādityas especially of the Imperial Gupta family contributed to the growth of the Vikramāditya saga.¹ Thus, in the early medieval period, ‘the lord of Mālava’ *par excellence* was no other than Vikramāditya (Candragupta II), and it was then quite natural to identify the Mālaveśa, with whom the Kṛta era came to be associated after the subjugation of the Mālava-gaṇa, with the great Vikramāditya of tradition. It must be remembered that there is no genuine evidence to prove the existence of a Vikramāditya, as a matter of fact, of any king having a title ending in *āditya*, before the 4th century A.D. and that the epoch of an era is never associated with Vikramāditya in records earlier than the 8th century A.D. It was only in the medieval period that, with the development of the Vikramāditya saga, the old Kṛta or Scytho-Parthian era introduced in Western India by the Mālavas began to be called ‘the era of Vikrama’, ‘the era known as Vikrama or Vikramāditya’ and later also ‘the era founded by Vikramāditya’.²