History of Kanauj to the Moslem Conquest c17.s7.5

c17.s7.5

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.