History of Kanauj to the Moslem Conquest c17.s7: Trilocanapāla and his successors
History of Kanauj to the Moslem Conquest c17.s7
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Trilocanapāla and his successors
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We do not know whether after this raid of Mahmud, Trilocanapāla abandoned Bari also for some safer corner of the kingdom, but it is certain that he survived the disaster, and continued to exercise a loose authority over the surrounding region.² This is evident from an inscription, discovered at Jhusi in Allahabad, which records that on the 26th June, 1027 A. D., he was in residence somewhere on the bank of the Ganges near Prayāga, and was in a position to make a grant of the village Labhundaka in the Asurabhaka *viṣaya* to the Brahmans of Pratiṣṭhāna.³ It is significant that he is therein honoured with the full imperial titles of P. M. P., but as the Pratihāra empire had now vanished as if into dreamland, it can only be interpreted as signifying that he wielded sovereign rights within his territory, and was free from external control. It is not recorded when Trilocanapāla ceased to rule, nor is there any definite information regarding his successor, but it appears likely that the Mahārājādhirāja Yaśaḥpāla, whose Karā (Allahabad district) inscription mentions the grant of a village named Payalāsa grāma in the Kausambi Maṇḍala in the (Vikrama) saṃvat 1093 or 1036, A. D., ascended the throne of Kanauj after him.¹
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² Ibn Asir, however, wrongly states that Barū-Jaypāl was killed by the Hindus themselves in the course of his struggle with Mahmud.
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³ *Ind. Ant.*, XVIII, pp. 33-35.
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¹ J. R. A. S., October 1927, pp. 694-95; Colebrooke’s Essays, II, p. 246; J. A. S. B., V. (1836), p. 731, etc.
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The names of the monarchs, who followed Yaśaḥpāla, are still more open to doubt. A stone inscription from Saheṭ-Maheṭh, dated in the Vikrama year 1176 or 1118 A. D.,² however, mentions a king of Gādhipura (Gādhipurādhipa) named Gopāla. It belongs to the time of Madana, and records that his minister Vidyādhara established a monastery or Vihāra for Buddhist monks. Unfortunately the epigraph does not explicitly indicate the relation between Gopāla and Madana, but it appears from the manner of description and from the fact that Vidyādhara’s father, Janaka, was Gopāla’s minister that they belonged to the same line and the one was succeeded by the other. We may, therefore, suppose that Gopāla ruled over Kanauj just before its conquest by Candradeva Gāhaḍavāla about the last decade of the eleventh century A. D. That Madana is content with the general epithet of “Kṣitipati” or lord of the land, and does not call himself the sovereign of Kanauj, also shows that after Gopāla the family was reduced to vassalage, the real power having passed into other hands. Now, the question is : Who were these rulers? The form of the name with the suffix pāla, which is found in almost all the names of the later Pratīhāra sovereigns, no doubt lends some colour to the view that they were Pratīhāras. But the Badaun inscription¹ gives us a different clue to the solution of the problem. Curiously, it mentions one Madana and also his father Gopāla in a list of Rāṣṭrakūṭa princes ruling over ancient Voḍāmayuta. This region was not far from Kanauj, and, as we shall see in the next chapter, Madana must have flourished in the beginning of the 12th century A. D. as a feudatory of Govinda-candra. Hence we may with Mr. N. B. Sanyal² identify Gopāla and Madana of the Sahet Maheṭh inscription with their namesakes of the Badaun record, and thus it appears that a branch of the Rāṣṭrakūṭas ruled over Kanauj for a short time before the rise of the Gāhaḍavālas.
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² Kielhorn, Ind. Ant., XVII, pp. 61-64; Ibid., XXIV, p. 176; J. A. S. B., LXI, pt. I, extra No. 1, p. 60 f.
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¹ Ep. Ind., I, p. 61 f.
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² See N. B. Sanyal, “The Predecessors of the Gāhaḍavālas,” J. A. S. B., (1925), Vol. XXI, No. 1, pp. 103-06.