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The Early History of the Deccan (Parts I–XI) v1.c7.s2: Identity and Homelands of the Sātavāhanas

The Early History of the Deccan (Parts I–XI) v1.c7.s2

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Identity and Homelands of the Sātavāhanas

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THERE is a great deal of controversy about the origin of the Sātavāhanas, and the date of their emergence into power. Inscriptions found in the caves of Nānāghāṭ and Nāsik in the Western Deccan mention the names of several kings of ‘Sātavāhana-kula’. These names as well as their order of succession are mostly in agreement with those of the Paurāṇic genealogies of the kings of ‘Andhra-jāti’. Some Purāṇas style them as Andhrabhṛtyas. Hence on the basis of certain names common to various kings mentioned in the two sources some scholars identified the Sātavāhanas of the epigraphical records with the Andhras of the Purāṇas; others strongly objected to this identification because in no inscription or coin are the Sātavāhanas called Andhras and similarly in no Purāṇa are the Andhras mentioned as Sātavāhanas.¹

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¹ For inscriptions see *ASWI*, v; *EI*, viii; for coins see *CIC*; and for *Purāṇas* see *DKA*.

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According to Sir R. G. Bhandarkar,² the earliest writer on the subject, ‘the Andhrabhṛtya dynasty of the Purāṇas is the same as the Sātavāhana dynasty of the inscriptions’. He explained the term ‘Andhrabhṛtya’ as meaning Andhras *who were once servants* or dependants. They came to power under the leadership of Simuka who uprooted the Śuṅgas and the Kaṇvas in 73 B.C. In his opinion Dhānyakaṭaka (near modern Dharaṇikoṭa in the Guntur District) was their eastern capital. Dr. J. Burgess wrote in 1887 that ‘the Sātavāhanas or Andhras held sway for about four centuries from the second century B.C. till the end of the second or the beginning of the third century A.D. . . . their conquests extended far to the north and to the western coast. . . . Their first capital is said to have been on the Kṛṣṇā at Śrīkākulam about 19 miles west of Masulipatam, and founded according to legend by Sumati, a great emperor; by whom is probably meant Simuka the first of the dynasty. It was afterwards transferred to Dhānyakaṭaka or Dharaṇikoṭa, and thence to other places.’³ According to Dr. V. A. Smith,⁴ the Andhra community in the days of Megasthenes occupied the delta of the Godāvarī and Kṛṣṇā rivers and possessed a military force second only to that of the Mauryas; the capital of the state ‘is believed to have been then Śrīkākulam’, on the lower course of the Kṛṣṇā; in the days of Aśoka, their rājā appears to have been in some measure subordinate to him; and soon after the close of the reign of that great emperor or possibly even before its close, they asserted their independence about 240 or 230 B.C. under a king named Simuka, and within a short period their authority spread as far west as Nāsik. Smith also says that ‘the Āndhra kings all claimed to belong to the Sātavāhana family and many of them assumed the title or bore the name Sātakarṇi’. Prof. E. J. Rapson is of the same opinion as Dr. Smith;¹ he adds, however, that at the time of Puṣyamitra Śuṅga’s incursion into Vidarbha the Andhras had ‘extended across the Deccan from the eastern coast’. Dr. L. D. Barnett states that their earliest capital was Śrī-kākulam,² then Dhānyakaṭaka, and finally in the first century A.D. it was at Pratiṣṭhāna in the centre of their western provinces.

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² *EHD*, p. 41.

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³ *BSAJ*, pp. 3-4.

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⁴ *EHI*, pp. 217-19; *Oxford History of India*, p. 119.

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¹ CHI, i, 519.

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² Ibid., p. 599.

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Prof. P. T. Srinivasa Ayyangar,³ while accepting the Andhra-Sātavāhana identity, treated the theory of an eastern origin of the Sātavāhana power in the Andhradeśa as misconceived. He put forth arguments to show that the Andhras were a Vindhyan tribe, that their kings originally ruled over Western India, and spoke Prākṛit and not Telugu, and that the extension of their authority was from the west to the east down the Godāvarī-Kṛiṣṇā valley. When their power declined in the west, the name Andhramaṇḍalam travelled to their eastern districts and became established there.

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³ IA, xlii, 276 ff.

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Dr. V. S. Sukthankar questioned the very basis of the Andhra-Sātavāhana identity.⁴ His main arguments are: (i) nowhere in their records are the Sātavāhanas called Andhras; (ii) other contemporary or nearly contemporary records, as the Hāthi-Gumphā, Girnār, and Talagunda inscriptions, always refer to them as Sātavāhanas and never as Andhras; (iii) Khāravela says that he ‘without entertaining any fear of Sātakarṇi, sent a large army to the west’. If this Sātakarṇi was in fact ruler of the Andhras, Khāravela’s army should have been sent to the south; (iv) all their inscriptions and coins were discovered in Western India. They had undoubtedly overrun and conquered the Andhra country; but their earliest possessions were, as revealed by archaeological discoveries, in Western India. The terms ‘Sātavāhanihāra’ and ‘Sātāhani-raṭṭha’ occurring in the Myākadoni inscriptions and Hirahaḍagalli plates were considered by Sukthankar as sufficient pointers to the solution of the problem. Myākadoni and Hirahaḍagalli being in the modern Bellary District, he suggested that this region or round about it should be taken as the original habitat of the Sātavāhanas. He drew support for his theory from the fact that at one time it was a common practice in many districts to name the country after its early inhabitants. Sātavāhanihāra, he suggested, was so named. His whole theme is that the Sātavāhanas did not belong to the Andhra area, as the field of their early activity was confined to the west of India, and Paiṭhan was their capital. If the Paurāṇic statement, he said, be accepted literally as implying that the Sātavāhanas were Andhras, he had two suggestions to make: either that the Sātavāhanas ‘separated themselves from the main stock of the Āndhras’ of the Godāvarī and Kṛiṣṇā deltas even before the time of Simuka (the founder of the Sātavāhana dynasty) and settled in the west; or that the Andhras themselves at first occupied Sātavāhani-hāra and then migrated from that centre towards the west and towards the east. But in his view the Sātavāhanas ‘may not have been Andhras’. Their connexion with the Andhradeśa was, according to him, the result of a migration from the west to the east. He further argued that ‘some of the Purāṇas call these kings Andhras; others call them Āndhrabhṛtyas; and there are others still who call them by both names’. In his opinion the correct designation of this dynasty is really Āndhrabhṛtya, a tatpuruṣa, meaning ‘the feudatories of the Andhras’. The feudatories of the Andhras need not necessarily be themselves Andhras.

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⁴ ABI, i, 21 ff.

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Mr. K. P. Jayasval also denied the Andhra-Sātavāhana equation.¹ He regarded the Sātavāhanas as probably representatives of the Sātiyaputras of Aśoka’s records, their oldest coins being struck in the name of Sāta. He thus indirectly supported the theory of the non-Andhra origin of the Sātavāhanas.

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¹ JBORS, iii, 441 note.

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Prof. Raychaudhari appears to subscribe to the views of Dr. Sukthankar but adds: ‘the name Andhra probably came to be applied to the kings in later times when they lost their northern and western possessions and became a purely Andhra power governing the territory at the mouths of the river Kṛṣṇā.’²

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² PHAI, 3rd edition, p. 280.

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Mr. V. S. Bakhle is inclined to identify the Sātavāhanas with the Satiyaputras.³ He enumerates more or less the same arguments as those advanced by Dr. Sukthankar and says: ‘to assert that the Sātavāhanas came from the Andhradeśa is going further than is warranted by evidence.’ He, however, does not accept Dr. Sukthankar’s identification of the original home of the Sātavāhanas with Sātavāhani-hāra in the Bellary District, which they ‘made their home in later times’. He emphatically declares that the Sātavāhanas were not Andhras. Why the Sātavāhana kings of the epigraphical records are treated as Andhras by the Purāṇas is explained by this critic as follows: ‘The Purāṇas were written only after the third century A.D., when the Sātavāhanas, driven out of Western India by the powerful forces of the Kṣatrapas, had migrated to the Andhradeśa. . . . That [fact] explains the mention of these kings as Andhras.’³ Dr. K. Gopalachari, like the above two scholars, maintains that the centre of gravity of the early Sātavāhana power lay in the Western Deccan, that the early Sātavāhanas did not rule over the Andhradeśa, and that the first authentic Sātavāhana records begin to appear in the Andhradeśa only with the reign of Vāsiṣṭhīputra Śrī Puḷumāvi; but unlike them he asserts that they were Andhras by tribal connexion.⁴ He suggests that either they were the scions of the royal family in the Andhradeśa or Andhra fortune-hunters who accepted service in the Western Deccan under the Mauryan suzerains, thereby getting the Paurāṇic appellation Āndhrabhṛtya, and that after Aśoka’s death their descendants may have struck a blow in their own interests in the land of their adoption. But he himself finally characterizes this suggestion as a mere conjecture, in favour of which ‘at present we have no evidence’.

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³ JBBRAS (new series), iii, 44 ff.

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⁴ EHAC, pp. 15-16, 26-7.

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Amidst this medley of conflicting theories and contradictory opinions one has to move warily to arrive at answers to two questions: (1) were the Sātavāhanas Andhras, or were they called Andhras by the Paurāṇic writers simply because they were found ruling in Andhra at the time of the compilation of their works, and (2) where did they begin their political career?

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It is true that no inscription or coin calls the Sātavāhanas Andhras. But it should be clearly borne in mind that in those days the custom was merely to note the family name in inscriptions, as is demonstrated by the records of the Śālaṅkāyanas, Bṛhatphalāyanas, Viṣṇukuṇḍins, Pallavas, Gaṅgas, Kadambas, Cālukyas, Vākāṭakas, &c. None of these dynasties made any reference to their community, tribe, or race. The same is the case with regard to the records mentioning Nahapāna and Rudradāman. The former is called a Khakharāṭa (Kshaharāṭa) and the latter a Karddamaka. This custom had such a strong grip that the inscriptions of even the latest Sātavāhana princes discovered in the Andhra area do not call them Andhras although their rule was confined only to the Andhra districts. When the Purāṇas call them Andhras, it can be reasonably assumed that they gave only the community or tribal (*jāti*) names of kings who actually belonged to the family (*kula*) of the Sātavāhanas.

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The term ‘Andhrabhṛtya’ does not militate against this assumption, when, as interpreted by Sir R. G. Bhandarkar, it means Andhras who were servants. Dr. Sukthankar’s interpretation of the term creates unnecessary difficulties; if the Sātavāhanas were not Andhras but the servants of these, and if at the time of their rise the Andhras were ‘powerful potentates in the Deccan,’ it is inexplicable how no vestige of the power of the latter is to be found in the contemporary records—literary, epigraphic, and numismatic. Since the selfsame kings are termed by the Purāṇas both ‘Andhrabhṛtya’, and ‘Andhra-Jātīyah’, it must be that the terms were interchangeable. These kings were, then, Andhras by community, and at the same time acquired power as servants of some other sovereign. The Paurāṇic testimony should not be lightly dismissed. The mention of Śrī-yajña as the reigning prince found in three independent manuscripts of the Matsya Purāṇa moves the date of its compilation well into the second century A.D. Moreover the earliest Purāṇa, the Bhaviṣya, from which the Matsya, Vāyu, Bhāgavata, and Viṣṇu derived their account, stops with the fall of the Andhras and the rise of ‘their servants’.¹ Thus so near were the compilers of the Matsya and the Bhaviṣya in point of time to the Sātavāhana kings that they could not have in their ignorance foisted the name Andhra on to the Sātavāhana princes simply because they found or knew them only as rulers of Andhra. The fact is that the Paurāṇikas were dealing with them in the larger context of their tribal or communal affinity. Thus it appears most likely that the Sātavāhanas belonged to the Andhra community.

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¹ EHAC, pp. 22-3.

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Much has been made of the language of the inscriptions of the Sātavāhanas in order to deny their connexion with the Andhras. The form of Prākrit they used is likened to ‘some kind of Proto-Mahārāṣṭrī, having no affinity with the Telugu, the language of the Āndhradeśa.’¹ It is implied in this statement that Prākrit was the mother tongue of the Sātavāhanas, which is far from being true of the Andhras. But as has been ably pointed out by Mr. Somasekhara Sarma,² it is not true that the language of the inscriptions was necessarily the language of the country where these Sātavāhanas had their home, nor is it by any means certain that this was introduced into the Andhra country by the successors of Gautamīputra Sātakarṇi. For the much earlier Bhaṭṭiprolu, Ghaṇṭasāla, and Amarāvatī inscriptions in the Andhra area are inscribed in Prākrit. Indeed Prākrit was the language of the inscriptions not only of the Sātavāhanas but of all the other ruling families of India, with very few exceptions, from 300 B.C. to A.D. 300. It was the language of the court and of the cultured. It was the sacred medium of religious literature and orations. The teachings of Buddha and Mahāvīra were immensely popular during these times and the Pāli they employed for their purposes was only the earlier form of Prākrit written and spoken in those days. As Sanskrit was to the Vedic age, so was Prākrit to this epoch. Whatever had any touch of religion or culture about it came to be expressed in Prākrit. The Sātavāhana and other records of the times registered gifts to Śrāmaṇas and institutions, Buddhist or Jaina. Hence the employment of Prākrit in Sātavāhana records. The celebration of Vedic sacrifices by Śrī Sātakarṇi (II) does not affect this argument in the least. For some time later when Sanskrit was restored to its former eminence Nannaya Bhaṭṭa, the first and greatest Telugu poet, wrote his Telugu grammar in Sanskrit. Therefore, it cannot be said positively that the language of the Sātavāhanas was ‘Proto-Mahārāṣṭrī’. The Prākrit of their inscriptions does not in any way militate against Sātavāhana–Andhra identity.

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¹ P. T. Srinivasa Iyengar, *IA*, xlii, 278.

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² *Bharati*, Prabhava, Vaiśākh, pp. 96-9.

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Assuming now that the Sātavāhanas were Andhras, the area of their early political activity can be ascertained only after correct location of the habitat of the Andhras in the earliest historical times. Whatever be the difference of opinion regarding Andhra–Sātavāhana affiliation, almost all scholars are agreed that the home of the Andhras then, as in later times, was the Telugu country, on the eastern side of India between the rivers Godāvarī and Kṛṣṇa. As the Choḷas and Pāṇḍyas appear to have from time immemorial occupied approximately the same geographical positions in which they are found at the dawn of history, it is very likely that the Andhras did the same. Buddhist literature of an earlier period locates the Andhra country south of Telivāhana, a tributary of Mahānadi. The Andhras existed as a great power in the days of Chandragupta with considerable military force and ‘thirty walled towns’. These walled towns may well have been held by a number of Andhra chieftains. In Aśoka’s Rock Edict XIII these appear to have nominally accepted his suzerainty. They are classed together with other semi-independent peoples of the Deccan. Of them, since the Bhojas are located in the Western Deccan, the Andhras with their thirty walled towns must have been in the Central and Eastern Deccan. On the whole it would appear that, as suggested by Dr. D. R. Bhandarkar, the land of the Andhras must have at this early period consisted of certain parts of the Central Provinces together with the Vizagapatam District, and may have also included the Godāvarī and Kṛṣṇā districts.¹ Thus there is no question of the Eastern Deccan having been called Andhra after its conquest by the Sātavāhanas. Andhradeśa existed where it is to-day even before the name of the Sātavāhanas came into prominence.²

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¹ Aśoka, 2nd edition, pp. 35-6.

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² K. R. Subramanian, BRA, pp. 8-10.

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Whether the Sātavāhanas started their political career in the Andhradeśa proper or outside it is another difficult problem. That they came to power from the Andhradeśa is held to be unwarranted mainly on four grounds: (1) their earliest records, epigraphic and numismatic, have been discovered at Nānāghāṭ and Nāsik in the Western Deccan; (2) in Khāravela’s inscription the dominions of the contemporary Sātakarṇi are spoken of as being to the west of Khāravela’s own kingdom of Kaliṅga; (3) Gotamī Balaśrī’s inscription recounting the territorial possessions of her son, Gautamīputra Sātakarṇi, makes no mention of any locality in the Andhra area; and (4) the first available Sātavāhana records begin to appear in Andhradeśa only during the reign of his successor Vāsiṣṭhīputra Śrī Puḷumāvi.

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But these arguments are based upon inadequate appreciation of the available records. If the discovery of records is to be taken as the *only* criterion for determining territorial possessions of a power, then the early Sātavāhanas will lose their title even to the Central and Southern Deccan. It is true that their earliest records have been found in the Western Deccan; but they are only two in number for twenty predecessors of Gautamīputra Sātakarṇi. Apart from this the inference drawn from them is not quite independent. It is derived from the preconceived notion that the Sātavāhanas had nothing to do with Andhradeśa until the reign of Puḷumāvi. It is forgotten that the earliest great Sātavāhana king Sātakarṇi (II), of the Nānāghāṭ record, who performed two *Aśvamedha*, one *Rājasūya*, and other sacrifices, bore the title *Dakṣiṇāpathapati*. The author of the *Periplus* distinguishes the market-towns of ‘Dachinabades’ from those of ‘Limyrika’, i.e. the Tamil lands. In this context Dakṣiṇāpatha, whether as mentioned in inscriptions or as noticed by the Greek writer, appears to cover the whole of the Deccan in contrast to the Tamil lands of the south. If it is conceded that the Sātavāhanas were Andhras, and that they were masters of the Deccan, then the sentence ‘heedless of Sātakarṇi, he sent his forces to the west' in Khāravela's inscription does not mean that Sātakarṇi's dominions were confined *only* to the west of Kaliṅga and had no connexion with the Andhra area. That the earlier Sātavāhana rulers included the latter in the countries over which they ruled is proved by one of the *Gāthas* in Hāla's *Sattasai*, which states that there was no royal house equal in prowess and nobility to that of the Sātavāhanas in all the country wherein the Godāvarī rises, flows, and falls into the sea. Another Prākṛt work, *Līlāvatīpariṇiya*, contains a tradition of Hāla's marriage on the banks of Saptagodāvarī, identified with the tank at Dakṣārām in the East Godāvarī District.¹ Gotamī Balaśrī's inscription cannot be said to have completely ignored the Andhra area: it refers to Siritana, Mahendra, and ‘Assaka’, as within her son's dominions. The first is the Śrīśaila hill in the Kurnool District; the second refers to the Eastern Ghats; and the last, even according to Bakhle, comprised the south-east province of the Hyderabad state and the Godāvarī District. The same record also notices that her son restored the glory of the Sātavāhanas by uprooting the Śakas, Yāvanas, and Pahlavas. Surely it cannot be maintained that the Śakas were masters of the area comprising Siritana, Mahendra, and ‘Assaka’. A more probable sequence of events would be that the Sātavāhanas had been masters of both Andhra and Mahārāṣṭra since at least the downfall of the Mauryan empire. When Nahapāṇa ousted them from the west coast they retained their hold over the rest of the empire including Andhra, and when Gautamīputra Sātakarṇi put an end to the alien rule, the Sātavāhana power was restored over the entire Deccan. It is this event which enabled his son Puḷumāvi to resume the title of (*Dakṣiṇa*)patheśvara which is reminiscent of the title of the earlier Sātavāhana ruler Sātakarṇi (II) of the Nānāghāṭ record. When the Sātavāhanas were finally driven out of Mahārāṣṭra by Rudradāman they retired to their homelands in the Andhra area.

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¹ Cited by Prabhakara Sastri, *JAHRS*, iv, 29-30.

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As regards their capitals, the suggestion of Śrīkākulam cannot stand scrutiny, since it is based upon unreliable and much later legend.² Dhānyakaṭaka (Dharaṇikoṭa in Guṇtūr District) appears to have been one of the early strongholds of Andhra power. It may indeed have been one of the ‘thirty walled towns’. When Mahārāṣṭra also became part of the Andhra empire, Paiṭhan became the seat of Sātavāhana government in the west. It is significant that in one of the inscriptions Gautamīputra Sātakarṇi is called ‘Lord of Dhanakaṭa’³—a reminiscence of his early position before his victory over the Khakharāṭas—and his son Puḷumāvi,¹ who had inherited the conquests of his father, resumed the title of ‘the lord of the Deccan’.

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² *IA*, xlii, 276.

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³ Nāsik No. 3 in *EI*, viii, 63 contains the term *Dhanakaṭasamanehi*. Its equation with *Dhanakaṭaramanehi* is out of the question for reasons given by Sir R. G. Bhandarkar and Dr. D. R. Bhandarkar (see *EHD*, 3rd edition, p. 30, note 13; *IA*, 1913, p. 280). M. Senart suggested Benakaṭa as an alternative reading for Dhanakaṭ ‘considering the general similarity of *b* and *dh*’. But he himself was not prepared to maintain his suggestion ‘against those who worked from the stone itself’. Hence Sir R. G. Bhandarkar's equation of *Dhanakaṭa-samanehi* with *Dhanakaṭa-sāminehi*, i.e. ‘lord of Dhanakaṭa’, must stand. Dhanakaṭa = Dhanakaṭaka = Dhānyakaṭaka.

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¹ This name is variously spelt: in inscriptions it is Puḷumāvi or Puḷumāyi; in the Purāṇas the variants are Puḷomāvi, Puḷomat or Puḷomā (*Matsya*), Paṭimāvi or Paṭumāvi (*Vāyu*), and Paṭumān or Puḷimān (*Viṣṇu*). In this chapter the form PUḶUMĀVI is adopted.

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The events leading to the occupation of Mahārāṣṭra and the establishment of government at Paiṭhan by the Sātavāhanas are shrouded entirely in mystery. The Purāṇic epithet ‘Andhrabhṛtya’ applied to them perhaps offers a clue to the riddle. This term, as pointed out before, means Andhras who were servants. In Aśoka’s Rock Edict XIII Andhras figure in a somewhat subordinate position. From such a position it was easy to assert themselves after the death of Aśoka, and to build up a state much more extensive and powerful than it had been in the days of the first Mauryan Emperor and Megasthenes. The growing menace of the foreigners may have necessitated the fixing of their headquarters at Paiṭhan.

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