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History of Kanauj to the Moslem Conquest c16.s1.t6: Mahendrapāla I

History of Kanauj to the Moslem Conquest c16.s1.t6

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Mahendrapāla I

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The last known date of Bhoja I's long reign, according to the Pehoa inscription, is 882 A. D., and we may therefore assume that he died two or three years later—say about 885 A. D. He was succeeded by Mahendrapāla, his son by queen Candrabhaṭṭārikādevī. This form of name is used in the majority of inscriptions, but the variants are Mahindrapāla,¹ Mahendrāyudha,² Mahiṣapāladeva,³ and also Nirbhayarāja and Nirbhayanarendra in the plays of Rājaśekhara.

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¹ *Mem. As. Soc. Beng.*, V, pt. III, p. 64.

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² *Ep. Ind.*, IX, pp. 2, 5.

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³ *Ind. Ant.*, XVI, p. 174.

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Like previous rulers of Kanauj, Mahendrapāla attempted the conquest of Magadha and Bengal, which, as we have repeated so often, were vital to the economic prosperity of Kanauj owing to their control of the lower course of the Ganges; and as we learn from the findspots of certain inscriptions, his enterprise met with some success. One of them dated year 8 of Mahendrapāla’s coronation was discovered at Rāmgayā, opposite the Gadādhar temple at Gaya, and records the gift of Ṛiṣi Saudi’s son Sahadeva on the pedestal of the figures of Viṣṇu incarnations.⁴ Another of the 9th year was found at Guneriya in the southern part of the Gaya district. It is engraved on the pedestal of an image of the Buddha, which was the pious gift of Śrīpāla, the son of the merchant Haridatta.⁵ A third votive inscription has been unearthed at Itkhori in the Hazaribagh district of Bihar¹. Here we have got the name of Parameśvara Mahendrapāla incised on the pedestal of an image of Tārā, and there is hardly any doubt that it refers to the Pratihāra king. A fourth votive inscription on an image of the Buddha taming the elephant Nalagiri comes from Bihar and yields the year 4 of the same ruler². Lastly a stone pillar, dedicated in the fifth year of king Mahendrapāla to the Buddha by Sthavira Jayagarbha, was discovered by Mr. R. D. Banerji in 1926 in a Buddhist temple at Paharpur in the northern part of the Rajshahi district of Bengal³, which shows that the greater part of Magadha upto even northern Bengal had come under the suzerainty of the Pratihāra monarch.

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⁴ *Mem. As. Soc. Beng.*, V, pt. III, pp. 64-65.

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⁵ *Ind. Ant.*, 1918, p. 110. Smith thought that this Mahendrapāla was a Pāla king (*Ibid.*, XXXVIII, p. 246). Mr. R. D. Banerji, on the other hand, rightly asserted that “a comparison with the Asni inscription of Mahīpāla confirmed him in the opinion

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¹ Ann. Prog. Rep. Arch. Surv. Ind. Central Circle, 1920-21, p. 5.

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² Ann. Rep. Arch. Surv. Ind., 1923-24, pp. 101-02. Two more records of Mahendrapāla dated year 6 and 2 (?) respectively are preserved in the British Museum, and according to Mr. R. D. Banerji they were also discovered in Bihar.

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³ Ann. Rep. Arch. Surv. Ind., 1925-26, p. 141; see also J. B. O. R. S., Dec., 1928, p. 505.

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This view also agrees with what we know of the Pāla kingdom about this time. Thus the Viṣṇupāda (Gaya) stone inscription of the 7th year, the Bihar (now Indian Museum) stone record of the 9th, and the Bhagalpur plate of the 17th year of Nārāyaṇapāla—issued from Mudgagiri and granting the village of Mukuṭikā in the Kakṣaviṣaya in Tirabhukti (modern Tirhut)—prove that in the earlier half of his reign Magadha continued to remain under the Pālas, but after this until the close of Nārāyaṇapāla’s long rule of about 54 years no Pāla inscriptions have been discovered in this region. Hence the Pratihāras must have occupied Magadha and

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that no other person than the great Pratihāra monarch was being referred to.” (Mem. As. Soc. Beng., V, p. 64).

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northern Bengal sometime during this interval, and as no inscription gives the credit for this achievement to Bhoja, nor any of his records has been found outside the eastern limits of the United Provinces, it is reasonable to conclude that the event probably took place soon after Mahendrapāla’s accession.¹ Perhaps the Cātsū inscription also contains a reference to it, since we learn that Guhila with excellent horses from the sea-coast vanquished the king of Gauḍa and levied tribute from princes in the east.² Now, Guhila was the son of Harṣarāja, the feudatory of Bhoja I, and as such a minor chief of Rajputana is not expected to invade the distant eastern regions on his own account, we may well suppose that he accompanied his Pratihāra suzerain in his expedition against Magadha and Bengal, and shared victories with him.

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¹ As regards the extent of the Pāla territories Mr. R. D. Banerji rightly says : “With eastern Bengal in the hands of the Candras, and eastern Magadha and northern Bengal in the hands of the Gurjara Pratihāras, the Pāla dominions were limited to the northern parts of the Gangetic delta and Western Bengal” (J. B. O. R. S., Dec., 1928, p. 508).

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² Ep. Ind., XII, p. 15, verse 23.

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In the west Mahendrapāla was certainly successful in maintaining and perhaps even in extending his hold over the peninsula of Saurāṣṭra, which gave him access to the sea. This seems clear from two grants found at Unā, a town in the southernmost part of Kāthiāwāḍ in the Jūnāgaḍh state;³ the one is dated in the (Valabhi) year 574 or 893 A. D., and the other in the (Vikrama) year 956 corresponding to 899 A. D. They record grants of the villages of Jayapura and Amvulaka in the Nakṣipur group of 84 in the Saurāṣṭra maṇḍala to the temple of the sun (Taruṇāditya-deva) by the Cālukya Balavarman and his son Avanivarman II Yoga respectively, who are described as feudatories (or, as the inscription expresses it, "had obtained the five Mahāśabdas") of the Paramabhaṭṭāraka, Mahārājādhirāja, Parameśvara Mahendrāyudhadeva. This suzerain is evidently the same as the Pratihāra king of Kanauj, for not only does the first record correctly represent him as meditating on the feet of Bhojadeva, but the second one even gives the standard form of his name, Mahendrapāla. Incidentally it is interesting to note that Balavarman is said to have "freed the earth from the Hūṇa race" by slaying Jajjapa and other kings. This shows that the south-western frontiers of Mahendrapāla's dominions were not free from disturbances, which were, however, effectively suppressed by the vigilance of his local feudatory.

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³ Ibid., IX, pp. 1-10.

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But the glory of Mahendrapāla's reign is partially dimmed by the diminution that his kingdom suffered in the north-west, for the verse of the Rājatarangiṇī quoted above informs us that the territories which were seized by the superior lord Bhoja were afterwards restored to the Thakkiya family during the course of Saṃkaravarman's expeditions abroad. This transaction has sometimes been assigned to the reign of Bhoja himself, but without adequate reason, as the context of the passage indicates that the Kashmiri monarch could not have "put forth great efforts to conquer the world" till long after his accession in *c.* 883 A. D. In the beginning he had to face a civil war "during which the kingdom was as if placed in a swing," and his position was so weakened that his commands were "disregarded in the purlieus of his own capital." If we, therefore, assume that he took some years—say about four years—to quell these disturbances, which, we are told, he did "with difficulty," and to make his throne secure, the date of his foreign undertakings would fall about 887-88 A. D. This would bring us very near the date of Mahendrapāla’s campaigns in the eastern regions—the earliest known date of the Pratihāra occupation of Magadha being the regnal year 2(?) and that of Northern Bengal the year 5 or *circa* 590 A. D. according to the Paharpur inscription¹—and we may not even be wrong in supposing that it was his rival’s preoccupation in the east which gave the opportunity to Śaṁkaravarman to carry out the transfer of the territories annexed earlier by Bhoja.

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¹ *See ante.*

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Whatever possessions Mahendrapāla might have thus lost in the Panjab it is certain from another Pehoa inscription that the district of Karnal continued to remain under Kanauj as it had been in the reign of his predecessor.² In the north his authority certainly extended upto the foot of the Himālayas, for the Dighwa-Dubauli plate issued by him from Kanauj records the grant of the village of Pāniyakagrāma, which lay so far distant as the Vālayikā Viṣaya of the Srāvastī-Maṇḍala in the present Nepalese Tarai, to the Bhaṭṭa Padmasara.³ The extent of Mahendrapāla’s kingdom in other directions is no doubt difficult to determine but it may well be presumed that he retained his jurisdiction over the territories, which were transmitted to him by his father Bhoja. Thus, the Siyadoni inscription, mentioning Mahendrapāla as the ruling sovereign in 903 and 907 A. D., makes it clear that the Gwalior region continued to be included within the Pratihāra realm. In passing we may add that there are certain indications of sporadic fights and unrest in this part, since the chieftain Uṇḍabhaṭa, who is recorded as a donor in this epigraph, is known from another inscription discovered at Terahi⁴ to have fought against the forces of a rival chief Guṇarāja, in which Caṇḍiyana, an adherent of the latter, was killed.

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² *Ep. Ind.*, I, pp. 245, 248.

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³ *Ind. Ant.*, XV, pp. 107, 112-13.

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⁴ *Ibid.*, XVII, pp. 201-02.

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Rājaśekhara

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Mahendrapāla was not only a worthy ruler; he was also a liberal patron of polite letters. The greatest literary ornament of his court was Rājaśekhara, who has left a number of works of varying merit. He represents himself as the *Guru* or *Upādhyāya* (spiritual teacher) of king Mahendrapāla or Nirbhayarāja in all the extant plays,¹ and proudly traces his poetic descent from Vālmīki through one Bhartṛmentha and the well-known Bhavabhūti.² He continued his residence during the reign of his royal disciple's son Mahīpāla,³ but we do not know how long he maintained his connection with the latter's court. Of Rājaśekhara's literary productions we know of the following :—

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¹ See e.g. *Karpūramañjarī*, I, 5, 9; *Viddha-śālabhañjikā*, I, 6.

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² *Bāla-Rāmāyaṇa*, I, 16; *Bāla-bhārata*, I, 12.

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³ See e.g., *Ibid.*, pp. 2, 16 (Cappeller's edition).

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(a) *Karpūramañjarī*, produced at the request of his wife, Avanti-Sundarī, who was born of a Cāhamāna family.

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(b) *Bāla-Rāmāyaṇa*, relating the story of Rāma from Sītā's *Svayaṃvara* to the death of Rāvaṇa, and the return to Ayodhyā after Sītā's fire-ordeal.

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(c) *Viddha-śālabhañjikā*, represented at the request of Yuvarājadeva. The occasion may have been his installation in the joint administration of the government.

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(d) *Bālabhārata*, sometimes called *Pracaṇḍa-Pāṇḍava*, staged at Mahodaya before Mahīpāla, the "paramount sovereign of Āryāvarta."

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(e) *Kāvyamīmāṃsā*.⁴ (f) *Bhuvana Koṣa*, to which he alludes in the 17th chapter of the last work.¹
(g) *Hara-vilāsa*, referred to by Hemacandra as an example of a poem bearing the name of its author.²

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⁴ See Dr. L. D. Barnett, *Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies*, for a short criticism of the work.

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¹ See *Kāvyamīmāṃsā*, (Gaekwad’s Oriental Series, 1924), ch. XVII, p. 98. ² Cf. “Svanāmāṅkitā yathā Rājaśekharasya Haravilāse” (*Kāvyānu-śāsana-viveka*, p. 335). ³ *Kāvya-mīmāṃsā*, ch. XVII, p. 94. ⁴ Cf. “Uttariyaṃ veṣaṃ namasyata Mahodaya-sundarīṇām” (*Ibid.*, ch. III, p. 8). ⁵ *Bāla-Rāmāyaṇa*, Act X, p. 306, verses 88, 90 (Benares edition, 1869).

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Unfortunately Rājaśekhara has not, like Bāṇa, left any account of his patron’s career, but here and there in his writings we get faint traces of the position and importance of Kanauj. He describes the imperial city as a very sacred place, whose people were “elegant like new compositions,” and from which the directions were to be measured³. The poet also speaks of the dress of the ladies of Mahodaya as “adorable,”⁴ and their ornamentation, braiding and speech as being studied by females of other countries.⁵ From these brief refetences it is evident that Kanauj had revived the pre-eminence it once enjoyed under Harṣa, and was again considered the centre of politics, fashion and culture.

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