Studies in the Geography of Ancient and Medieval India c18.9

c18.9

I visited the village on the 9th of January and discovered no less than three interesting inscriptions. A stone pedestal of a lost image in a locality, called Saṅgat owing to its being a Sikh religious establishment in the village, was found to bear a very important inscription dated both in the 18th regnal year of king Madanapāla of the Pāla dynasty and in the Śaka year 1083. The importance of the date of this record has been discussed elsewhere; but the fact it records is no less interesting. It says that two Vaiṣṇava brothers of a Brāhmaṇa family established an image of the god Nārāyaṇa at Krimilā. The second inscription discovered and examined by me at Valgūdar was found on a broken image of a goddess with a child on her lap and with a lion as her emblem, lying in the veranda of the Kutchery of Babu Dalipnarayan Sinha who is a zamindar of Bhagalpur. It may be mentioned here that images representing the Devī with a child seem to have been very popular in all parts of South Bihar. We have noticed such images in many villages. One such image is now in the Asutosh Museum of Indian Art of the University of Calcutta and it bears an inscription of the time of Rāmapāla. The find-spot of this image also seems to us to be some village of South Bihar. A similar image at Rajauna near Valgūdar is known, from the inscription on it, to have been called Puṇḍeśvarī. It is possible that this rural deity, apparently not unconnected with the conception of Pārvatī with Skanda on her lap as indicated by the theme of Kālidāsa's Kumārasambhava, and of the Buddhist Hārītī, was worshipped under different local names in various localities.¹ The inscription on the Valgūdar image of the Devī with a child says that it was installed by a person named Nṛkaṭṭa at the adhiṣṭhāna or city of Kṛmilā. It may be