The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest, including the Invasion of Alexander the Great c31.s5.60

c31.s5.60

² The best-known work dealing with Prithīrāj is the *Chand-Rāisā*, or *Prithīrāj-Rāisā*, a Hindī epic, extremely popular in the United Provinces. The authorship is attributed to Chand Bardāi, who was the court poet of his hero and patron. A descendant of the poet still lives in the Jodhpur State on the income of the lands granted to his ancestor by Prithīrāj. He has the MS. of the original poem, consisting of only 5,000 verses. Additions were made by descendants until Akbar's time, enlarging the work to 125,000 verses. Copies of part of the original have been made, and it is hoped that the whole may be published (*J. & Proc. A. S. B.*, Feb. 1911, *Ann. Rep.*, p. xxx). The supposed chronological errors in the *Rāisā* are explained by the discovery that the author used the Ananda variety of the Vikrama era, equivalent roughly to a. d. 33, and so 90–1 years later than the ordinary Sananda Vikrama era of 58–57 b.c. (*J. R. A. S.*, 1906, p. 500). Chand gives the date of Prithīrāj's birth as 1115 of *ananda*, which means '*nanda-rahit*', devoid of nine, 'nine' being one of the sub-meanings of *nanda*. *A-nanda* therefore means (100–9) 91 or 90. Possibly the high-caste Rājpūts declined to recognize the low-caste Nanda kings, to whose dynasty they may have assigned a period of 91 years. Another explanation is that Prithīrāj founded an era of his own on account of his jealousy of Jaichand, who claimed descent from Vikrama, dating the era perhaps from the time of Prithīrāj's ancestor Chandra Deva (Syam Sundar Das in his *Annual Report on the Search for Hindi MSS. for 1900*, pp. 5–10). See also Hoernle in *J. R. A. S.*, 1906, p. 500. Both eras were current in Rājputāna in the twelfth century. The Sanskrit work from Kashmir, entitled *Prithivīrāja vijaya*, discovered and made known by Bühler, is of higher authority and great historical value. It was composed between a. d. 1178 and 1200, probably later than 1191. Its genealogical statements are