The Early History of the Deccan (Parts I–XI) v1.c7.s2.17

v1.c7.s2.17

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’.