The Dynasties of the Kanarese Districts of the Bombay Presidency from the Earliest Historical Times to the Musalman Conquest c8.s11.252

c8.s11.252

The most direct evidence as to the position of the Lâṭa country, appears to be furnished by some of the Râshṭrakûṭa records of the ninth century A. D.⁹ From them we learn that Gôvinda III. gave the Lâṭa province, or, as it was also then called, the province of the lords of Lâṭa, to his brother Indrarâja. Indrarâja's son Suvarnavarsha-Karkarâja had the title of Lâtêśvara or "lord of Lâṭa." We find him and his brother Prabhûtavarsha-Gôvindarâja granting villages of which the modern representatives still exist in the neighbourhood of Barôda and of Jambûsar in the Broach District. And this locates Lâṭa in Gujarât, and places the country along the south of the river Mahî in the Lâṭa country, as its boundaries then stood. This, however, was after the absorption of the Gurjara territory into Lâṭa. And from certain Western Chalukya records which will be noticed in the next chapter, and from the synchronous Gurjara records which will be dealt with just below, we can now recognise that Lâṭa was originally a smaller territory, bounded on the north, and separated there from the Gurjara country, by the river Kîm, which, rising in the hills of the Râjpiplâ State in the Rêwâ-Kâṇṭhâ, flows into the gulf of Cambay, between the Narmadâ on the north and the Taptî on the south. The southern boundary is not quite so certain. But, at any rate, Nausârî in the Barôda territory, on the south of Surat, and Ashṭgâm or Astgâm, a few miles to the south-east of Nausârî, were in the Lâṭa country. And, if we bear in mind how many ancient divisions of India have been preserved more or less intact to even the present day, it seems very probable that the southern limit of Lâṭa was the river Damaṇgaṅgâ, which divides, where they touch each other, the present districts of Surat and Thâṇa, just as, towards the coast, the Kîm separates the Surat District from Broach. On the east, the Lâṭa country was doubtless bounded by the Western Ghauts. As a record of A. D. 888 tells us that a territorial division known as the Variavi hundred and sixteen, which was the country round the modern Wâriâv just to the north of Surat and was in Lâṭa, was in the Koṅkaṇa viṣaya,¹ it is evident that Lâṭa was one of the seven divisions of the Koṅkaṇa, and it was, in fact, the most northern of them. And, from the manner in which, in the grant of the Western Chalukya prince Avanijanâśraya-Pulikêśin, one of the feudatory rulers of Lâṭa, it is said that the army of the Tâjikas, or Arabs, wishing to enter the Dekkan with the desire of conquering all the kings of the south, came in the first instance to reduce "the Navasârikâ country,"² it seems tolerably certain that the capital of the original Lâṭa territory was Navasârikâ, i.e. the modern Nausârî.