Studies in the Geography of Ancient and Medieval India c12.38

c12.38

Banavāsi, Māhiṣaka (cf. Mahiṣa-viṣaya in a Kadamba grant), etc., in some of the traditional lists may possibly refer to the fact that these names originally signified separate geographical units abutting on one another. Sometimes however one of them may have formed the part of another; cf. the case of Tamralipta which is mentioned in literature as an independent state, as a part of Suhma and also as a part of Vaṅga; also the case of Taxila (Raychaudhuri, *Stud. Ind. Ant.*, pp. 186 f.). With the rise of Kanarese powers like the Cālukyas and the Rāṣṭrakūṭas, the name Karṇāṭa (sometimes also the name Kuntala) extended over a large part of the Western and Southern Deccan. In the *Kaliṅgattu-paraṇi*, the Cālukyas have been described as the *Kuntalar*, ‘lords of Kuntala’ (literally, ‘the Kuntalas,’ indicating their Kanarese origin).... An inscription of Harihara II dated in Śaka 1307 ......says that Vijayanagara (modern Hampi in the Bellary District) belonged to the Kuntala *viṣaya* of the Karṇāṭa country.”