Studies in the Geography of Ancient and Medieval India c12.25

c12.25

The *Pārāyaṇa*, incorporated in the *Suttanipāta*, speaks of a sage named Bāvari who was an inhabitant of Śrāvastī but settled ‘in the country of Aśmaka, in the vicinity of Mūlaka, on the bank of the Godāvarī’. ² While describing the journey of Bāvari’s disciples from the sage’s hermitage in Aśmaka to a locality in Northern India, the same work says that the first place reached was Pratiṣṭhāna (modern Paiṭhan on the Godāvarī in the Aurangabad District) which was the capital of the Mūlaka country; the men are said to have next reached Māhiṣmatī on the Narmadā, and then Ujjayinī outside the limits of Dakṣiṇāpatha. This shows that the Aśmaka country lay immediately to the south of Mūlaka which is the Paiṭhan region of the Aurangabad District. The ancient capital of the Aśmaka country was, according to the *Mahābhārata*, at the city of Paudanya which is known as Potana (< Podanna < Paudanya) in the Pali literature. A variant of the form Potana is Potali which seems to be a mistake for Poṭana or Poṭaṇi (cf. the striking similarity between the forms of the two letters *l* and *ṇ* at some stages of development), the latter being a possible corruption of Paudanya through another intermediate form Podaniya.³ Raychaudhuri identifies Paudanya with modern Bodhan near the Godāvarī in the Nizamabad District abutting on the Nander District in the old Hyderabad State. In a narrow sense therefore the Aśmaka country may be identified with the Nander-Nizamabad region of Andhra Pradesh and the adjoining area. In ancient literature, however, Aśmaka is often represented as including Mūlaka, i.e. the Paiṭhan area of the Aurangabad District, and as abutting on Kaliṅga (roughly speaking, the coastal land between the Mahānadī and the Godāvarī), Vidarbha, Aparānta (the Northern Konkan) and Avanti, doubtless the celebrated Avanti-Dakṣiṇāpatha with its capital at Māhiṣmatī on the Narmadā, identified with Mandhata in the Nimar District or Maheswar in the former Indore State. This wider sense must have been in the mind of Bhaṭṭasvāmin when he identified Aśmaka with Mahārāṣṭra, i.e. the Marāṭhā country. But the heart of this land appears to have been the northern districts of old Hyderabad including naturally the southernmost region of Berar. The heart of the ancient Aśmaka country thus seems to have corresponded to the dominions of the Vākāṭakas of Vatsagulma. Rāṣṭrakūṭa Mānāṅka therefore claimed victory not only over the Kadambas of Kuntala and the Vākāṭakas of Vidarbha, but also over the Vatsagulma branch of the Vākāṭaka dynasty of Aśmaka.