The Rashtrakutas and their Times c18.s1.8

c18.s1.8

(1) Regular Taxes (i and ii) Udranga and Uparikara These taxes are mentioned very frequently not only in the grants of the Rāṣṭrakūṭas but also of the earlier dynasties like those of the Parivrājakas, Maitrakas and the later Guptas of Magadha. It must be, however, confessed that modern scholarship has not yet succeeded in ascertaining satisfactorily their exact meaning; nor do Sanskrit dictionaries help us much. This latter fact is rather surprising and perplexing; for these expressions are very common in the numerous records of our period and yet are unknown to most of the Kosha writers. It is only in S'ās'vata Kosha that we come across a sense that can be reasonably considered in connection with the present enquiry; the work gives *Uddhāra* or *Udgrāha* as a synonym of the term.¹ The only other Kosha where the word is mentioned at all is the *Trikāṇḍa s'esha-kosha*, according to which *Udraṅga* is the name of the celestial city of Harischandra moving in the air.² This meaning, which has been copied from this Kosha by some of the modern Sanskrit and English dictionaries, can be hardly considered in connection with the present enquiry. Since the word is very common in the epigraphical literature and almost unknown to the Koshas, can it be possible that the word is a Sanskritised form of some non-Indo-European word? The term *Udraṅga* cannot be also connected with the word *draṅga* which means a frontier town in the *Rājatarangiṇī*; it is not possible to argue that the expression *sodraṅgaḥ* might mean ‘along with the octroi duties’, for then the form would have been *sadraṅgaḥ* and not *sodraṅgaḥ*. As it is, though we get several variations of the fiscal terms occurring in epigraphical records, the form of the term *sodraṅgaḥ* is constant; not even once do we get *sadraṅgaḥ* as an alternative form.