The Dynasties of the Kanarese Districts of the Bombay Presidency from the Earliest Historical Times to the Musalman Conquest c8.s11.11

c8.s11.11

² Banawâsi, in lat. 14° 33', long. 75° 5' (Indian Atlas, sheet No. 42, where it is entered as ‘Bannawassi’), is a place of very considerable antiquity. It is the Vanivâsi to which, as recorded in the Mahâvaṃsa, the Buddhist teacher Rakshita was deputed, in the third century B. C., shortly after the great council held at Pâtaliputra in the eighteenth year of Aśôka (Ind. Ant. Vol. III, p. 273). And it was also mentioned, in the second century A. D., by the geographer Ptolemy, in whose map of India (id. Vol. XIII, p. 329), under the name of Banauasi, it is entered (quite wrongly) to the east by south from Barygaza, i. e. Broach in Gujarât. In inscriptions, the earliest mention of it, under the name of Vanavâsi, is in the Aihole inscription of A. D. 634-35 (id. Vol. VIII, p. 244). In later records, the name is usually written as Banavâsi in Sanskrit passages, and as Banavase and Banavâse in Kanarese passages; the latter two forms being specially used, and generally so, when mention is made of the province, which was held to consist of twelve thousand cities, towns, and villages. The form Vanavâsa also occurs (e. g., P. S. and O.-C. Inscrs. No: 178, l. 33, and Vikramâṅkadêvacharita, v. 23, and xiv. 4). Mr. Kittel has expressed the opinion that the etymology is bana, = vana, ‘a forest,’ + the Kanarese basi or base, ‘a spring,’ and that Vanavâsi is only a Sanskritised form (Nâgavarma's Kanarese Prosody, Introd. p. xxxi, note 2). But the occurrence of the form Banavâse, with the long â in the penultimate syllable, seems to be opposed to this, and to point to the Sanskrit vanavâsa, ‘the residence or settlement in the forest,’ being the original name. And there are traditions to the effect that the province of Vanavâsi is the part of the country in which the Pâṇḍavas spent the twelve years of their banishment to the forests, as related