Historical Geography of Ancient India c8.283

c8.283

*Koṭivarṣaviṣaya*—(Jain Koḍivarisa or Koḍivarisiyā).—It is recorded as a sub-division of the Puṇḍravardhanabhukti. It is in the epigraphic records of the Pālas and Senas of Bengal that the name frequently occurs. It must have included the whole or a part of Dinajpur. Bānagrām, modern Bāngarh, was the chief town of Koṭivarṣa. According to the Jaina *Avaśyaka Niryukti* (1305) King Cāliya of Koḍivarisa became a Jain ascetic. The ruins of Bāngarh are found on the eastern bank of the river Punarbhavā, one and a half mile to the north of Gaṅgārāmpur, which is 18 miles south of Dinajpur. The region round Gaṅgārāmpur may be identified with Koṭikapura or ancient Devakoṭa, the capital of Koṭivarṣa in Northern Bengal. According to tradition Bāngarh was the site of the fortified town of the demon king Bāṇa whose wife Kālārāṇī is said to have a tank dug called Kāladīghi at Gaṅgārāmpur. According to the copper-plate inscription of Mahīpāla I, discovered at Bāngarh, Mahīpāla regained his lost paternal kingdom. Some of the old relics of Bāngarh are now kept in the Dinajpur palace. Here we find a richly carved stone-pillar made of touch-stone, a Śiva temple and a Buddhist *caitya* of about the 11th century A.D. According to the Dāmodarpur grant of the time of Budhagupta and Jayadatta (*E.I.*, XV, 138ff.), Doṅgā, a village, existed in the sub-division of Himavacchikhara (lit. on the summit of the Himalayas) in the Koṭivarṣaviṣaya of the Puṇḍravardhanabhukti (*I.C.*, V, p. 433).