The Dynastic History of Northern India (Early Mediaeval Period) v2.c30.s4.90

v2.c30.s4.90

According to Merutuṅga, the brilliant reign of Vākpati met with a tragic end. He tells us that ‘‘as the king of the Teliṅga country, named Tailapadeva, harassed Muñja, by sending raiders into his country, he determined to march against him, though his prime minister (*Mahāmātya*) Rudrāditya, who was seized with illness, endeavoured to dissuade him. The minister conjured him to make the river Godāvarī the utmost limit of his expedition, and not to advance beyond it; but he looked upon Tailapa with contempt, as he had conquered him six times before; so in his overweening confidence he crossed the river and pitched his camp on the other side.⁵ When Rudrāditya heard what the king had done, he augured that some mischief would result from his headstrong conduct and he himself entered the flames of a funeral pile. Then Tailapa by force and fraud cut Muñja’s army to pieces and took king Muñja prisoner, binding him with a rope of reed (*muñja*). He was put in prison and confined in a cage of wood and waited upon by Tailapa’s sister Mṛṇālavatī, with whom he formed a marriage-union. His ministers, who had arrived subsequently, dug a tunnel to the place where he was, and made an appointment with him.’’ The story next proceeds to relate that Muñja urged by his love to Mṛṇālavatī, revealed his plans to her, and the latter betrayed him to her brother. As a result of this Tailapa ‘had him bound with cords and taken about to beg from house to house’ for his food. ‘‘Then the king had Muñja put to death and his head fixed on a stake in the courtyard of the palace, and by keeping it continually covered with thick sour milk, he gratified his anger.’’¹ Though this story reads like a romance and its details are probably worthless as sources of history, yet there is no doubt that the main fact recorded in it is true. That Vākpati had really a minister named Rudrāditya is proved by his Ujjain grant, where a person of that name is mentioned as the *Dāpaka* residing at the *Mahāvijaya-skandhāvāra* at Guṇapura in A.D. 980. The fact that Vākpati lost his life in a war against the Cālukya Tailapa is attested by the records of the Kalyani dynasty. Two inscriptions of Vikramāditya VI (*c.* 1055-1126) tell us that Taila II killed the valiant Muñja.² The *Ā’īn-i-Akbarī* also records the tradition that Muñja ‘ended his life in the wars of the Deccan.’³ The date of this event has been fixed with tolerable certainty by Bühler.⁴ As the colophon of Amitagati’s *Subhāsita-ratna-saṁdoha* states that it was composed during the reign of Muñja in V. S. 1050 (A. D. 993-94), and as Tailapa II himself died in Śaka 919 (A.D. 997-98), it is certain that Muñja's death must have occurred between *c.* 993-94 and 997-98 A. D. The same scholar also suggested that 'the beginning of Vākpati's reign is probably not far distant from A. D. 974, the date of his first land grant.'