Tribes in Ancient India c61.s2.26

c61.s2.26

Hoernle in his English translation of the Jaina work, *Uvāsagadasāo*, advances the suggestion that the three districts referred to in the *Dulva* and in the *Aṭṭhakathā*, ‘may very well have been Vesālī proper, Kuṇḍapura and Vāṇiyagāma occupying respectively the south-eastern, north-eastern and western portions of the area of the total city. Beyond Kuṇḍapura, in a further north-easterly direction lay the suburb (or ‘station’, *sannivesa*) of Kollāga which appears to have been principally inhabited by the Kṣatriyas of the Nāya (or Jñātṛ) clan, to which Mahāvīra himself belonged; for it is described as the *Nāya-kula*.’¹ He further observes that the phrases used in the *Āyārāṅga-sūtra* like ‘*Uttara-Khattiya-Kuṇḍapura-sannivesa* or *dahiṇa-māhaṇa-Kuṇḍapura-sannivesa*’, ‘do not mean the northern Kṣatriya (resp. Southern Brahmanical) part of the place Kuṇḍapura, but the Northern Kṣatriya, etc., suburb of Kuṇḍapura, i.e. that suburb (*sannivesa*) of the city of Kuṇḍapura, which lay towards the north and was inhabited by the (Nāya clan of) Kṣatriyas; it was distinguished from the southern suburb of the same city (Kuṇḍapura or Vesālī) which was inhabited by the Brahmins. This interpretation is confirmed by the parallel phrases in Kap. §22 (*et passim*), Khattiya-Kuṇḍagāme Nayare and Māhaṇa-Kuṇḍagāme Nayare, which are rightly translated as the Kṣatriya (resp. the Brahmanical) part of the town Kuṇḍagāma’.² He also points out that ‘the phrase *ucca-nīya majjhimāiṃ kulāiṃ*, “upper, lower and middle classes”, applied to the town of Vāṇiyagāma in sections 77, 78 (of the *Uvāsagadasāo*) curiously agrees with the description of Vesālī given in the *Dulva*.’³