The Dynastic History of Northern India (Early Mediaeval Period) v1.c15.97

v1.c15.97

That the dynasty of the Pālas did not end with Indrapāla, appears to be probable from the copper-plate grant of Dharma-pāla.⁴ This king refers in his inscription to his father Harṣamāla (pāla ?) and grandfather Gopāla. In the present state of our knowledge it is impossible to decide whether Gopāla, if he really belonged to the line of Brahmapāla, was an immediate successor of Indrapāla. Another prince apparently of this family was the *Kāmarūpa-nṛpati* Jayapāladeva, referred to by the recently discovered Salimpur stone inscription of the Brahman Prahāsa. This inscription is incised on a slab of blackstone and was found in the Mauza Salimpur, Police Station Kethal, of the Bogra District in Bengal. The object is to record the erection of a temple wherein the above-mentioned Brahman set up an image of Amara-nātha. As in the Bhuvaneśvar inscription of Bhaṭṭa Bhavadeva,¹ we have here a record not of kings and ministers but the history of a Brahman family rendered illustrious by the birth of great scholars. Prahāsa traces his descent to a family which originally lived in Tarkāri within Śrāvasti and then in Bālagrāma in Varendrī. From Prahāsa upwards to Paśupati the *praśasti* mentions seven generations. In verse 22 of this inscription we are told that Prahāsa, 'though excessively solicited, did not by any means accept 900 gold coins (*hemnām śatāni nava nīrbharam*...) and a grant of land (*Śāsana*) yielding an income of a thousand (measures of rice) from Jayapāladeva, king of Kāmarūpa, when the latter was making a *Tulāpuruṣa* gift.² As the characters of the inscription are a variety of Northern alphabet which was used especially in Bengal and Magadha in the 11th century, and show close resemblance to the letters of the inscription of the Pāla king Nayapāla (*c.* 1040-55 A.D.), it is impossible to identify him with Jayapāla, the cousin of Devapāla (*c.* 815-50 A.D.).³ In view of the proximity of the findspot of this inscription to the frontier of Kāmarūpa and the similarity of its characters to those used in the inscriptions of the Pālas of Kāmarūpa it will perhaps be reasonable to accept this prince as belonging to that line. But his position in the order of kings is less certain. Mr. Basak, the editor of the inscription, has proposed to place him somewhere after Indrapāla; but it is not certain whether he should come after or before the Gopāla-Dharmapāla group. It was probably during the reign of these later Pāla rulers that the Varmans of Eastern Bengal invaded the Brahmaputra valley. The Belava grant of Bhojavarman informs us that his grandfather Jātavarman invaded Kāmarūpa. If the identification of Vīraśrī, the queen of this ruler, with a daughter of the Kalacuri Lakṣmī-Karṇa (*c.* 1041-70 A.D.) be accepted, Jātavarman was a contemporary of Vigrahapāla III of Bengal (*c.* 1055-81 A.D.).¹