The Rashtrakutas and their Times c7.s1.111

c7.s1.111

It will have become already clear from what has been said so far, that the terms raṭhi, mahāraṭhi, raṭhika, rāṣṭriya, rāṣṭrapati and rāṣṭrakūṭa possessed merely political and administrative significance; none of them was used to denote any tribal or ethnical stock. R. G. Bhandarkar has argued that the name Mahārāṣṭra is due to the province being occupied in the early days by the raṭhis and the mahāraṭhis,(54) but with due deference to the views of that learned scholar, it must be confessed that there is no evidence to show that the raṭhis and the mahāraṭhis were the names of any tribes, Aryan, non-Aryan or mixed. Mr. C. V. Vaidya holds that the Rāṣṭrakūṭas represent the captains of the Aryan army, who parcelled out the districts in Mahārāṣṭra among themselves. This view again ignores the presence of the Rāṣṭrakūṭas in Andhra country, and of the raṭhis and the mahāraṭhis in Karnatak right upto Chitaldurga. The Nāga worship, which prevailed extensively among the raṭhi and the mahāraṭhi families, is surely no argument to prove their Aryan origin. We must, therefore, conclude that the facts so far known do not support the view that the Rāṣṭrakūṭas belonged to any particular stock, either Aryan or non-Aryan.