A History of the Mahrattas v1.c5.s3.8

v1.c5.s3.8

It is correctly argued by Professor D. R. Bhandarkar that ‘Mahā’ in the word Mahārathini is an honorific affix, as it undoubtedly is in the word Mahā-bhoja. Corroborative evidence is supplied by another early inscription in a cave at Nānāghāt, Poona District, which records that Sātakarni, ruler of the Deccan and third prince of the indigenous Āndhra or Sātavāhana dynasty, had a queen named Nāganikā, who was ‘the daughter of the Mahārathi Tranakayiro of the Angiya family.’² The Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsiang (A.D. 640) styled the kingdom of the early Chālukya dynasty of the Deccan Mo-ho-lo-cha, which is the Chinese transliteration of Ma-hā-rā-tha. In A.D. 753 a prince of the indigenous dynasty of Rāshtrakutas or Rattas overthrew the reigning Chālukya, a foreigner of Hūna-Gurjara descent, and thus obtained the mastery of the Deccan which his successors held for nearly two and a quarter centuries. Later still, from the middle of the eleventh until the end of the first quarter of the thirteenth century, a dynasty of Rathas or Rattas held sway in the Southern Marāthā country. Albiruni mentions (c. A.D. 1030) ‘Mahrat-dessa’ (i.e. Mahratta dēsh, Mahratta country); Friar Jordanus refers (c. A.D. 1328) to ‘the Kingdom of Maratha’; while Holwell (Hist. Events, &c., i. 105), writing in A.D. 1765, speaks of the ‘Maharattors,’ and states that the name is compounded of ‘Rattor’ and ‘Maahah.’³