Studies in the Geography of Ancient and Medieval India c9.s2.1

c9.s2.1

In modern times, the name Gauḍa is often used in Bengali literature to indicate the whole area inhabited by the Bengali-speaking people. Originally however the Gauḍa country seems to have comprised, in a narrow sense, the present District of Murshidabad together with the southernmost areas of the Malda District of Bengal. The Chinese pilgrim Hiuen-tsang who visited India in the first half of the seventh century A.D. speaks of Karṇasuvarṇa as the name of both the capital and the kingdom of king Śaśāṅka who killed king Rājyavardhana of Thānesar about 605 A.D. The king responsible for the death of Rājyavardhana is however described in the *Harṣacarita* of Bāṇa, who flourished at the court of Rājyavardhana’s younger brother and successor Harṣa, as ‘the lord of Gauḍa’. There is thus no doubt that Gauḍa was the usual name of Hiuen-tsang’s kingdom of Karṇasuvarṇa apparently so named by the Chinese traveller after the name of the capital of that kingdom. According to the Chinese account, the celebrated Buddhist monastery called Raktamṛttikā-vihāra stood on the suburbs of the city of Karṇasuvarṇa and the country of that name was about 730 or 750 miles in circuit. As the monastery in question has been located at modern Rāṅgā-māṭi (literally, ‘the red earth’, the same as Sanskrit *Rakta-mṛttikā*) about eleven miles to the south of Murshidabad, the Karṇasuvarṇa or Gauḍa country has to be located about the present Murshidabad District, although the dominions of the Gauḍa king Śaśāṅka is known to have actually comprised wide regions of Eastern India.