History of Kanauj to the Moslem Conquest c9.s1.t1.15

c9.s1.t1.15

ruled practising the most horrible cruelties till a new chief arose to deliver the land from an intolerable foreign thraldom. This was the *Janendra* Yaśodharman, who won a powerful position for himself by inflicting a crushing defeat on the tyrannical Hūṇa chief, Mihiragula, “the Attila of India.” His Mandasor inscription¹ further claims that he brought under his sway lands which even the Guptas and the Hūṇas could not subdue, and made himself master of India from the Brahmaputra to the western ocean, and from the Himalayas to the Mahendragiri, i.e., Kaliṅga (cf. the Allahabad Pillar Inscription. According to Smith, however, it denotes the southernmost peak of the Travancore Ghats; *E. H. I.*, 4th ed. p. 339). Making due allowance for hyperbole in this contemporary epigraph, it appears that Yaśodharman exercised some sort of loose hegemony over the north during the heyday of his power, but his success was short-lived and the Guptas soon emerged from their temporary eclipse. For, the Khoh inscription of Saṃkṣoba, dated in the Gupta year 209=528 A. D. “in the enjoyment of sovereignty by the Gupta kings”,² and according to Mr. R. G. Basak, another record of Ucchakalpa Mahārāja Sarvanātha of the Gupta year 214=533 A. D.,³ show that at that time Gupta authority was recognised, even though nominally, in Central India. Besides, Dr. Raychaudhuri has well pointed out that “in A. D. 543-44, ten years after the Mandasor inscription, which mentions the *Janendra* Yaśodharman as victorious, the son (?) and Viceroy of a Gupta Paramabhaṭṭāraka Mahārājādhirāja Prithivipati, and not any official of the Central Indian *Janendra*, was governing the Puṇḍravardhana *Bhukti*—a province which lay between the Indian interior and the Lauhitya."¹