Social Life in Ancient India: Studies in Vatsyayana's Kamasutra c6.178

c6.178

In the fourth century before Christ we meet with a mention of Gauḍa in the Arthaśāstra of Kauṭilya who describes a variety of silver called "Gauḍika which is the product of a country known as Gauḍa.”¹ The ancient commentary of Bhaṭṭasvāmin here explains that Gauḍikam or Gaulikam was the silver from Kāmarūpa (Kāmarūpajam).² Here his geography is a little faulty like that of Yaśodhara who calls the Gauḍas, as we have seen before, a Prācya people living in Kāmarūpa. Evidently to commentators living in the far south or west, the distance between Bengal and Kāmarūpa which are contiguous countries, was immaterial, especially as the boundaries varied quite often with the advent of every ambitious monarch. The commentators prove at least the fact that according to Indian tradition, Gauḍa was in the East and not in the region near Thaneswar or Gonda. We may also observe that Kauṭilya’s name for Kāmarūpa is Pāra-Lauhitya,³ or ‘the Trans-Lauhitya country’— the country on the other side of the Brahmaputra. Evidently therefore Kauṭilya’s Gauḍa was not Kāmarūpa, but must have been the same as the Gauḍa of Parāśara who was not much removed from him in date.