Early History of the Dekkan down to the Mahomedan Conquest c16.2

c16.2

For about three centuries after the extinction of the Andhrabhṛityas, we have no specific information about the dynasties that ruled over the country The Mâtsya and the Vâyu, as observed before, place seven princes of a branch of the Andhrabhṛityas after them, and I have given reasons to believe that the Madharîputra of the inscription and the coins referred to before was one of them This branch seems to have been in possession of the whole extent of the country that was ruled over by their predecessors If the fact, noticed before, of some coins of the later Kshatrapa kings being found in a village near Karhâḍ is to be regarded as evidence of their sway over this country and not to be attributed merely to commercial intercourse, the Kshatrapa dynasty also must be considered to have obtained possession of a portion at least of the Dekkan after the Sâtavâhanas The earliest of these princes is Vijaya Sâha¹ (or Sena) whose date is 144² which, if the era is that of the Śaka kings, corresponds to A D 222, while the latest date we have assigned to the Sâtavâhanas is about A D 218 The last of the princes whose coins are found near Karhâḍ is Visva Sâha (Sena), one of whose coins has the date 214 and another 224, corresponding to A D 292 and A D 302 ³ About this time princes of the race of Âbhîras or cowherds must have come into power Ten of them are mentioned in the Purâṇas In the Nâsik caves there is an inscription dated in the ninth year of Vîrasena Âbhîra, the son of Damarî and of Śivadatta Âbhîra ⁴ The characters in the inscription, though they do not differ much from those in the inscriptions of the later Andhrabhṛitya kings, must be regarded as more modern The language is Sanskrit, which I regard as an indication of a later era When the popular dialect became different from the Pâli, or the Pâli became less sacred, the people fell back upon the original Sanskrit for such purposes as those of recording religious gifts, and thus in all the later grants we find the Sanskrit used, while, from the times of Aśoka to the extinction of the Andhrabhṛityas, the language used was mostly the Pâli, or, to speak more accurately, one or more of the Prâkṛits of the period The Âbhîras were in power for sixty-seven years according to the Vâyu Purâṇa Many other dynasties are mentioned in the Purâṇas as having ruled over the country But the information given there is much more confused than in the case of the previous families It appears that the dynasties that ruled over different parts of India at the same time are put together and confused with those that succeeded each other, so that it is not possible without extraneous assistance to determine their chronological relations