India as Known to Panini: A Study of the Cultural Material in the Ashtadhyayi c13.14

c13.14

An important factor in determining Pāṇini's time would be the name and time of the Nanda king known to Pāṇini. This question is of admitted difficulty owing to confusion in the chronology of the Nandas. There are, however, two points more or less fixed: (1) the year 326 B.C. as the final year of the last Nanda king, ruling over the country of the *Prasii* and *Gangiridae* as reported to Alexander. He was overthrown by Chandragupta Maurya. The other date is obtained by reckoning from the fifth year of king Kharvela who in the Hathigumpha inscription dated in the year 165 of the era of Rājā Muriya refers to Nandarāja in connection with a canal excavated by him 300 years earlier. Another passage in the same inscription records that king Nanda carried away to Magadha the statue of the first Jina. We thus find King Nanda ruling in Pāṭaliputra about the year 465 B.C. This Nanda king can be no other than Nandivardhana (*Early History of India*, p. 44). Of the kings of Śiśunāga dynasty as given in the *Purāṇas* Nandivardhana and Mahānanda occur as the last two kings after whom came the base-born Nandas. With the point 465 B.C. falling within the reign of king Nanda, we arrive at a tolerably fixed period for the reigns of these two Nanda kings as c. 473 B.C. to 403 B.C. Mahāpadma Nanda and his sons appear to have followed from about 403 B.C. to 323 B.C. According to Tārānātha, Nanda the patron of Pāṇini was the father of Mahāpadma. It is thus evident that the Nanda king, the reputed contemporary and patron of Pāṇini of the popular stories is Mahānanda, son and successor of Nandivardhana, or the Nandarāja of the Hathigumpha inscription. In view of the joint period of the reigns of Nandivardhana and Mahānandin as stated above, we may assume the dates c. 446 to 403 B.C. for the reign of Mahānandin.