History of Kanauj to the Moslem Conquest c17.s2.31

c17.s2.31

As regards the Ramaṭhas and the Kulūtas of the Panjab of whom Rājaśekhara expressly states that they were “conquered” and their “fortunes appropriated by violence,” there is nothing improbable in the view that they were actually compelled to accept the suzerainty of Mahīpāla. This conclusion is further reinforced by the fact that the district of Karnal was included within the Pratihāra kingdom since the days of Bhoja I, and Mas‘udī records that “the Mihran of Sindh comes from well-known sources in the highlands of Sindh, from the country belonging to Kanauj in the kingdom of Baüüra and from Kashmir......,”¹ which clearly shows that parts of the Panjab continued to be under Kanauj. The south-western limit of Mahīpāla’s jurisdiction is of course fixed by the Haddala plates dated Śaka 836 or 914 A. D., from which we learn that at the beginning of his reign eastern Saurāṣṭra was being governed by his feudatory (Mahā-sāmantādhipati) Dharaṇivarāha, who granted to Maheśvarācārya on the day of the winter solstice the village named Vimkala.² Bühler on the other hand identified the Mahīpāla of the Haddala grant with one of the Cūḍāsamas of Girnar-Junāgaḍh,³ but considering the fact that the Unā grant mentions Avanivarman II Yoga, the feudatory of Mahendrapāla, as an opponent of a Dharaṇivarāha, identified with the Mahāsāmantādhipati of the Haddala record, it seems more reasonable to suppose that the latter eventually came under the Pratihāra yoke and that the name Mahīpāla refers to his Kanauj suzerain. It has sometimes been assumed that Saurāṣṭra, which had been connected with the Pratihāras since the reign of Nāgabhata II, must have slipped away from their hands after the raid of Indra III, but there is no evidence of any such rupture until the rise of Mūlarāja Cālukya. A powerful monarch like Mahīpāla must certainly have made his authority felt there, and even after him we may well believe that for a time the local chiefs of Kāthiāwād continued to make a show of submission, as the Nawabs of Oudh found it profitable to do during the declining days of the Great Moghul at Delhi. Towards the east, however, after the Pālas had recovered some of their lost territories, the Pratīhāra kingdom does not seem to have extended much beyond the western borders of Bihar. The Bengal Asiatic Society’s plate, issued from Mahodaya, which records the grant in V. E. 988 or 931 A. D. to Bhaṭṭa Bhullāka of a village named Tikkarigrāma in the Vārāṇasi-viṣaya of the Pratiṣṭhāna-bhukti, at any rate shows that the Benares region was still under Kanauj¹.