presentation. Moreover, ministers have a more multifaceted profile than ritu-
alists, who are defined primarily by intellect and morality, and secondarily by
prestige, competence, and eminence, these five dimensions constituting almost
the entirety of their profiles. The fuller profile of ministers also explains why
competence — clearly a desirable trait in ministers — is relatively less promi-
nent in them than in the profile of ritualists. Within the dimension of intellect,
too, they differ from ritualists in that the latter group’s subcategories of intel-
lect are comprised almost entirely of learnedness (94%, not illustrated). Being
educated is also a prominent hallmark among ministers (50% of their intellec-
tual attributions), but intelligence is a close second (28.8%), and a smattering of
other intellectual qualities (such as expertise in policy and providing counsel)
is more noticeable here than among ritualists.

3.5.3. Bureaucrats

In Figure 13, the bureaucratic type of dignitary is profiled side by side with other dignitaries and with commoners who, like bureaucrats, are non-aristocratic and non-Brahmanical public figures. The bureaucrat profile is expected to be a mix of the traits of the two groups of comparison.

Bureaucrats are, most of all, characterised by morality (35.2%) and prestige (22.5%). Both of these dimensions are in fact distinctly more prominent in the bureaucrats' profile than in those of the compared sets. The difference is especially striking in morality, which stands at 17.2% in non-bureaucrats and 16.4% in commoners, but is also unmistakable in prestige (15.2% in non-bureaucrats and 13.4% in commoners).

In the above two prominent dimensions, bureaucrats are slightly closer to
other dignitaries than they are to commoners. A commonality with other dig-
nitaries is clearly manifest in eminence, which, while still highly prominent in
bureaucrats (15.5%), is slightly more noted for non-bureaucrats (17.5%) and far
more for commoners (26.9%). On a much smaller scale, bureaucrats also resem-
ble non-bureaucratic dignitaries in having more beneficent traits (4.2% and
3.7%) than commoners (1.5%).<fnref n="67" />

Bureaucrats differ both from non-bureaucratic dignitaries and from com-
moners in intellect, which is in this group noticeably low, though not negligible
(4.2%), while being much more prevalent in other dignitaries (9.8%) as well as
in commoners (10.5%). Submission is much less noticed among bureaucrats
(5.6%), than among non-bureaucrats (9.7%) or commoners (10.5%), and appeal

<footnote n="67">67 All dignitaries including bureaucrats lack entitlement (0%), a dimension that has some presence in the profile of commoners (1.5%), which I discuss on p. 156.</footnote>
shows a similar distribution, with bureaucrats lowest (1.4%), other dignitaries higher (4.4%) and commoners quite a bit higher still (9%). Competence, conversely, is highest among bureaucrats (8.5%), though almost as prevalent among commoners (7.5%) and only a little less noted for other dignitaries (6.8%).

<figure><img src="image_26.png" /><figcaption>Figure 13. Bureaucratic dignitaries compared to dignitaries as a whole and to commoners. The dimensions, clockwise from top, are Prestige, Dominance, Belligerence, Prowess, Competence, Eminence, Intellect, Morality, Beneficence, Submission, Appeal, and Entitlement.</figcaption></figure>

Finally, bureaucrats appear more akin to commoners than to non-bureaucratic dignitaries in their relative lack of prowess (2.8%), which is also largely absent in commoner foci (1.5%), but definitely present in other dignitaries (8.2%) due
to the inclusion of aristocrats in that group. The situation is the same as regards belligerence (0% in bureaucrats, 1.5% in commoners, versus 5.8% in other dignitaries), and, on a much more subdued scale, as regards dominance (0% in bureaucrats and commoners, versus 1.9% in non-bureaucratic dignitaries).

Bureaucrats differ from aristocratic dignitaries in that belligerence, prowess and dominance are absent from their profiles, and can be set apart from Brahmanical dignitaries by the low prevalence of intellectual qualities in their characterisation. Finding tendentious differences between the profile of bureaucrats and that of commoners is difficult. Both of these groups contain “sundries” who did not fit clearly into a positively defined class. Moreover, both samples are small, so some of the findings are likely to be haphazard and would not conform to the same profiles found on a larger sample of similar data, if such were available. Nonetheless, it is perhaps not accidental that bureaucrats are most prominently noted for morality, since they, unlike the commoners, are court functionaries in responsible positions.<fnref n="68" /> Conversely, commoners are mostly noted by their eminence, which suggests that the specific virtues and traits imputed to sovereigns, dignitaries and ritualists are less relevant to these foci who, when they are given praise, get it largely in general terms.

## 3.6. Changes over time

While introducing the Eastern Cālukyas above, I have pointed to a fairly sharp division into two periods, marked in the texts by a sudden rise in the visibility of underlings (including instigators, secular donees and Brāhmaṇa donees in political office) from the reign of Vijayāditya III onward (r. c. 849–), and connected this to supraregional politics, in particular to heightened Rāṣṭrakūṭa interference in the affairs of Veṅgī both through direct military assault and through supporting contenders for the Veṅgī throne. In this section I explore whether and how the characterisation of rulers and underlings reflects the changing political milieu.

### 3.6.1. Sovereigns before and after 849

Figure 14 shows the profiles obtained for sovereigns in grants issued before the reign of Vijayāditya III and in those issued by or after Vijayāditya III, while

<footnote n="68">68 This applies at least to people featured as executors (ājñapti), whom many earlier grants of the dynasty introduce in a slightly varying *anuṣṭubh* verse with the qualification *nirmalo dharma-saṁgrahah* (or *dharma-vatsalah*). The category of good conduct is also an important factor in the moral aspect of bureaucrats.</footnote>
Figure 15 illustrates the fluctuation of selected dimensions over time, based on separate sovereign profiles created for each century of the dynasty's lifetime.<fnref n="69" /> As noted in the description of the corpus, the eleventh century is represented by a mere four charters, hence that segment of the data is more prone to idiosyncratic variation.

The most conspicuous difference between the two periods is a peak of belligerence in the later one: at 16.1%, belligerence is in this time bracket the second most prevalent trait of sovereigns. While the related dimensions of dominance and prowess stay quite constant, belligerence makes up only 4.9% of attributions in the earlier bracket, which gives it the humble eighth rank out of twelve. Breaking the data down by century shows that the share of belligerence in royal representation increases quite steadily: although it is actually a bit smaller in the eighth century than in the seventh, it is under 6% in both. It then nearly doubles in the ninth century, and climbs until it reaches 19.5% in the eleventh. The rise in belligerence is accompanied, and perhaps balanced to some degree, by a definite, though less striking, growth of emphasis on the beneficent aspect of the king, from 4% in the earlier period to 8.2% in the later. Century by century, beneficence rises steadily up to the tenth century (peaking at 9%), but drops off again in the eleventh.

In the earlier time bracket, the prominence of prestige, competence and entitlement exceeds the values obtained for the later bracket. Prestige is the number one most frequent characteristic of sovereigns throughout time, but is at its peak (28.9%) in the eighth century and at a low (21.9%) in the tenth. Following a similar trend, entitlement peaks in the eighth century at 18.6%, with slightly smaller prevalence in the seventh, and a steady decline from the ninth century onward, dipping to 7.8% in the eleventh century. Entitlement ranks as second most prevalent up to the ninth century, but from the tenth, it drops behind belligerence. Competence, though never emphatic in the representation of rulers, drops noticeably from 8% in the earlier period to 3.2% in the later one. The prevalence of this dimension peaks in the eighth century (9.1%), then drops sharply in the ninth (2.7%), after which it rises very slowly but steadily.

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ Although some of the earlier (up to the mid-eighth century) and some of the later (from the mid-tenth century) charters of the Veṅgī Cālukyas are dated, most are not. For the purpose of this comparison, undated grants were arbitrarily assigned to the rough midpoint of the issuing ruler's reign; where the issuer is himself uncertain, either the midpoint of a larger period was set (for consecutive issuer candidates) or the most likely issuer was assumed to be factual (for non-consecutive candidates).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_27.png" /><figcaption>Figure 14. Sovereigns before and after 849. The dimensions, clockwise from top, are Prestige, Dominance, Belligerence, Prowess, Competence, Eminence, Intellect, Morality, Beneficence, Submission, Appeal, and Entitlement.</figcaption></figure>

The mounting emphasis on the belligerent traits of rulers is in accordance with the change in the political atmosphere, and may also conform to a more widespread trend towards a culture of military opportunism (Davidson 2002, 62–67). The diminishing prevalence of entitlement is largely due to a simple matter of quantity and proportion. As demonstrated above (Figure 5), entitlement is mostly attributed to the royal dynasty rather than to individual members. With the progress of time, the acclamation of the dynasty stays much the same after
the roughly standard formula crystallises in the late seventh century.<fnref n="70" /> However, individual people — predecessors as well as the reigning king — are presented in increasing detail, the result of which is a waning relative prevalence of entitlement. Looking only at the “self” orbit of descriptions, the drop in entitlement is much smaller (5.2% in the earlier period to 2.5% in the later, not illustrated in a chart), while in patrilineal ancestors it is barely noticeable (0.9% to 0.8%).

<figure><img src="image_28.png" /><figcaption>Figure 15. Changes over time in the profile of sovereigns</figcaption></figure>

No straightforward explanation offers itself for the other differences noted between the profiles of the two periods. The unmistakable rise in belligerence has to come at a cost to other components of the profile (as the sum of all dimensions in a profile is always 100%). Since much of the price seems to have been paid by prestige and competence, it is possible that belligerence

<footnote n="70">70 The formula is cited on p. 128 above.</footnote>
increasingly replaced non-martial competence as a qualification of a ruler, and
that the prestige accrued from aggressive action made it less necessary to heap
on other attributions of generic prestige. That said, if the prevalence of individ-
ual dimensions is charted separately for each ruler who issued extant grants
(not illustrated), the fluctuation is much larger in all dimensions than that seen
in the breakdown by century. In the later period, peaks of belligerence often
correspond to troughs in prestige, and occasionally to troughs in competence
too. Still, much of the jaggedness at this level of the data is probably more or
less random rather than tendentious.

3.6.2. Aristocrats before and after 849

Figure 16 shows the profiles of the aristocratic type of dignitaries for the same two periods. Only male targets are included in this analysis, because there are no female targets at all in the earlier period, so their presence in the later segment would distort the comparison.

While the belligerence of aristocrats is practically identical in the two peri-
ods (10.5% earlier and 10.3% later), there is a marked decrease in their domi-
nance (10.5% to 2.3%) and prowess (21% to 16.6%). This is accompanied by a sig-
nificant increase in morality (0% to 14.1%) and submission (5.3% to 11.8%). It is
likely that suzerains and underlords alike engaged in military activities more
often and on a more massive scale in the later period than in the former. But
while this is reflected in the belligerence scores of sovereigns, it is not apparent
in the belligerence attributed to aristocrats, whom later royal propaganda de-
picted as more submissive and dutiful than in the less tumultuous olden days. If
this analysis of limited data reflects a genuine trend, then the interpretation
which offers itself is that the sovereigns who issued these grants treasured —
and hoped to instil — reliability rather than rapacity in their underlings.

I hasten to add that there are a mere 19 attributions characterising aristocratic dignitaries in the earlier period (and all of these are from the seventh century), as opposed to 398 in the latter period, so any surmise is doubtful. Breaking the data down by centuries or by issuing rulers (neither of these is illustrated here), the picture becomes more chaotic. Dominance and prowess still decline steadily from the ninth century to the eleventh, but morality peaks in the tenth century and then falls off rather than continuing to increase, while submission drops sharply from the ninth to the tenth, then bounces back to rise higher than ever in the eleventh.
<figure><img src="image_29.png" /><figcaption>Figure 16. Aristocrats before and after 849. The dimensions, clockwise from top, are Prestige, Dominance, Belligerence, Prowess, Competence, Eminence, Intellect, Morality, Beneficence, Submission, Appeal, and Entitlement.</figcaption></figure>

# 4. Concluding thoughts

## 4.1. Summary of quantitative findings

As pointed out above, dimensions with a small number of attributions in the corpus are difficult to analyse in profiles that also incorporate more widely prevalent dimensions, because variation in these smaller dimensions is

DOI: 10.13173/9783447122306.093

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overshadowed by the larger ones. This problem of scale notwithstanding, most of the dimensions identified in the qualitative stage are useful in distinguishing various classes of actors. The following discussion involves the three focus classes of sovereigns, ritualists, and commoners, while the fourth class of dignitaries is here subdivided into the three types of aristocrats, ministers, and bureaucrats. Table 4 shows the prevalence of each dimension in these six types of protagonists, and is colour-coded according to the prevalence of each dimension across profiles. In each row, the profiles of the six types have been ranked from lowest to highest according to the prevalence of the dimension represented by the current row, relative to the same dimension's prevalence in the other profiles. Colours from black through blue and yellow to red indicate increasing prevalence, as shown in the last row of the table.

<table><caption>Table 4. Prevalence of dimensions in types of protagonists</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>sovereign</th><th>ritualist</th><th>commoner</th><th>aristocrat</th><th>bureaucrat</th><th>minister</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th>prestige</th><td>24.4%</td><td>11.3%</td><td>13.4%</td><td>13.6%</td><td>22.5%</td><td>17.1%</td></tr><tr><th>dominance</th><td>11.4%</td><td>1.1%</td><td>0.0%</td><td>2.4%</td><td>0.0%</td><td>1.3%</td></tr><tr><th>belligerence</th><td>12.0%</td><td>0.0%</td><td>1.5%</td><td>9.3%</td><td>0.0%</td><td>1.6%</td></tr><tr><th>prowess</th><td>6.4%</td><td>0.3%</td><td>1.5%</td><td>12.7%</td><td>2.8%</td><td>2.6%</td></tr><tr><th>competence</th><td>5.0%</td><td>10.2%</td><td>7.5%</td><td>6.5%</td><td>8.5%</td><td>7.1%</td></tr><tr><th>eminence</th><td>9.3%</td><td>10.2%</td><td>26.9%</td><td>17.9%</td><td>15.5%</td><td>17.1%</td></tr><tr><th>intellect</th><td>1.7%</td><td>41.5%</td><td>10.5%</td><td>3.7%</td><td>4.2%</td><td>17.4%</td></tr><tr><th>morality</th><td>7.1%</td><td>20.1%</td><td>16.4%</td><td>15.3%</td><td>35.2%</td><td>19.5%</td></tr><tr><th>beneficence</th><td>6.6%</td><td>2.8%</td><td>1.5%</td><td>2.8%</td><td>4.2%</td><td>4.7%</td></tr><tr><th>submission</th><td>0.3%</td><td>1.9%</td><td>10.5%</td><td>10.3%</td><td>5.6%</td><td>9.0%</td></tr><tr><th>appeal</th><td>2.3%</td><td>0.8%</td><td>9.0%</td><td>5.8%</td><td>1.4%</td><td>2.6%</td></tr><tr><th>entitlement</th><td>13.6%</td><td>0.0%</td><td>1.5%</td><td>0.0%</td><td>0.0%</td><td>0.0%</td></tr><tr><th>colour key</th><td>highest</td><td>very high</td><td>fairly high</td><td>fairly low</td><td>very low</td><td>lowest</td></tr></tbody></table>

Prestige is quite prevalent in all classes, although conspicuously more so in sovereigns and bureaucrats. Yet even in the class least characterised by prestige, namely that of ritualists, this trait makes up almost half as large a part of the profile as in sovereigns. Thus, prestige is not the best criterion for distinguishing between various kinds of people. However, its fairly even distribution across classes is a strong indication that copperplate charters serve not only to elevate
the status of the donor and to fix other actors in a position of dependency, but also to heighten the esteem of these other actors. The surprisingly high preponderance of prestige among bureaucrats is in all probability a quirk of statistics: about two thirds of all prestige-related attributions associated with this type pertain to the brothers Bhīma and Naravāhana and their family, who are certainly not typical members of this vaguely defined class.<fnref n="71" />

Dominance is almost solely a royal prerogative. It is hardly or not at all present in most classes, though aristocrats are allowed a modicum of this trait. References to dominance in the inscription thus very clearly set the status quo: the sovereign is absolutely dominant, with subordinates a very long step below them, though a little above non-aristocratic players. Moreover, as pointed out in 3.3, the dominant traits of dignitaries (chiefly comprised of aristocrats) consist primarily in the aggressive overpowering of specific others (the king's enemies, presumably), while those of the rulers include surmounting all rivals.

Belligerence is also most prevalent among sovereigns, but here, aristocrats are a very close second, while everyone else is far behind. The message is again clear: while kings readily assert their dominance when they have to, a certain degree of aggressiveness is a generally valued trait in aristocrats. It is worth recalling in this connection that within royal profiles, belligerence mostly characterises the patrilineal predecessors of the anytime current ruler, while there appears no such difference in aristocratic profiles, among whom the here and now readiness to exercise violence is as important as a family history of having done so.

Prowess is closely associated with belligerence, but with some important, if small, distinctions. In this dimension, aristocrats stand foremost by far, with sovereigns a distant second and everyone else lagging far behind. This inverse pattern compared to the distribution of belligerence among sovereigns and their subordinates seems to say, yet again, that a subordinate must possess the potential for warfare, but unleash it only in specific circumstances against specific targets, as directed by his suzerain.

Competence has low to middling prevalence in all classes of people. It is highest in ritualists and bureaucrats, and lowest in sovereigns, but the variation in this dimension is too small on the whole to differentiate readily between classes. The pattern may nonetheless be significant; at any rate, it corresponds to the expectation that proficiency in one's tasks is most crucial for these specialists.

<footnote n="71">71 See p. 105 about Bhīma and Naravāhana.</footnote>
Eminence, the faculty of standing out without the specification of any par-
ticular skill, is highest by far among commoners and lowest (but still quite prev-
alent) in sovereigns. Aristocrats and ministers are in the upper mid-range, with
bureaucrats only slightly less characterised by this dimension. Like the related
dimension of prestige, eminence is thus imputed to all kinds of actors, but most
of all to commoners who do not abound in more specific virtues worthy of men-
tion (compare intellect below), and to generalists such as aristocrats and minis-
ters. It is worth noting in this connection that although aristocrats score higher
than all other classes in belligerence, eminence is actually more prevalent than
any other dimension within the aristocratic profile.

Intellect has tremendous prevalence in the class of ritualists, far in excess of ministers, among whom intellect is nonetheless a crucial dimension. While the ritualist profile is narrow, with very few other dimensions playing a significant role, that of ministers is much broader, so no single dimension can stand out as far as intellect does in the highly specialised ritualists. Intellect also has some relevance to the profiles of commoners, but is barely present in the characteri-sation of other classes.

Morality stands out in the image of bureaucrats almost as much as intellect
does in that of ritualists. Although the class of bureaucrats has been defined
above more by exclusion than by inclusion criteria, and is represented only by
a small number of attributions, it is perhaps no accident that qualities related
to integrity are highly valued in this class. Morality is also highly prevalent in
all other classes except for sovereigns, and is actually the most noted character-
istic of ministers, whose virtue and honesty are also crucial for their masters.

Beneficence is a hallmark of status. Although it is low in all profiles when
compared to other dimensions in the same profile, it is still clearly the highest
among sovereigns when compared across profiles. Bureaucrats and ministers
stand a step lower, aristocrats and ritualists lower still, and commoners lowest.
Beneficence in fact consists of factors such as protecting subjects, supporting
dependents and being hospitable: these three, however, do not really go hand
in hand. Rather, each characterises a different class: protection is a kingly activ-
ity, supportiveness is primarily aristocratic, and hospitability is most typical of
political Brāhmaṇas.

Submission is an essential characteristic of commoners and aristocrats, as
well as of ministers to a slightly lower degree. It is noted to some extent among
bureaucrats, but very low in ritualists and practically absent in sovereigns. The
basic trend here seems to be that the more military power a group wields, the
more important it is to emphasise their submissiveness. Thus, from the perspec-
tive of royal ideology, ritualists — i.e. householder Brāhmaṇas and temple
officiants — are not rivals, and therefore need not be expressly represented as
submissive. At the other end of the spectrum, the military aristocracy's descrip-
tions are carefully articulated to assert submissiveness on their part. Recall also
that submission becomes more prominent over time in the class of aristocrats.
Bureaucrats are a mixed group which probably includes some members of said
aristocracy, which may explain their middling submission. The high prevalence
of submission in the representation of commoners seems to be an exception
from the trend, but this may be unreliable as the sample is very small, with only
67 attributions describing the group as a whole. Of the mere seven attributions
that pertain to submission among commoners, three in fact refer to being em-
ployed in an office, and two each to rendering a particular service and to having
the lord's favour. The submission of aristocrats and bureaucrats includes a
fourth factor, that of accepting the lord's supremacy. The absence of this factor
from the profiles of commoners, ministers and ritualists may indicate that in
their context, attributions of "submission" actually imply usefulness to the lord
rather than acceptance of subordinate status. The high prevalence of submis-
sion in ministers may be explained by the same reasoning, or by the fact that
they wield considerable political power.

Appeal generally has low prevalence, but is highest in commoners, middling
in aristocrats and low to very low in all other groups. As discussed above, much
of this variation depends on the degree to which women are present (as foci or
satellites) in a group: when only males are scrutinised, it is in fact ministers who
stand highest in appeal while commoners have none. Male appeal seems to be
largely a leadership quality, and within it, physical handsomeness and erotic
attractiveness go primarily with rulers and their subordinate aristocrats, while
in ministers, appeal manifests rather in the form of charisma. Female appeal, on
the other hand, seems to be associated as if by rote with the women of aristo-
crats and sovereigns, but may in commoners be an actual trait or talent for
which some non-aristocratic women were specifically noted.

Entitlement makes the clearest distinction between sovereigns, who possess
it, and everyone else, who as a rule do not. This implies that sovereigns differ
from their underlords and subjects not only in terms of scale, but also in es-
sence. Even though subordinate rulers share many aspects of kingship, includ-
ing some level of recognised dominance, they — at least according to their over-
lords' ideology — lack explicit indications of being entitled to rule over other
rulers. The presence of entitlement in the profile of commoners is entirely
thanks to a single person, a minister’s mistress.<fnref n="72" /> This extraordinary lady, Sabbākā, does not fit any category of my analysis and was assigned to the commoners on the basis of exclusion from the other focus classes. She belongs to the Paṭṭavardhinī family, said to be descended from the celestial handmaiden Jayā, thus qualifying for entitlement through divine ancestry. What this actually implies is, however, not a divine right to rule and dominate, but a capacity to be a supernaturally excellent member of the royal retinue.

## 4.2. The analytical framework

The conceptual framework I have devised for the analysis of representation in copperplate *praśasti* has only been introduced in rough outline above, and will be discussed in detail in a separate paper on the method. At this point, I wish only to touch briefly on one of its shortcomings.

My simplistic fourfold classification of foci into sovereigns, dignitaries, ritualists, and commoners was reached after considering several more complex alternative schemes at length. Due to numerous uncertainties and idiosyncrasies in the data, I saw no way to set up definable criteria for a finer classification without obtaining either many discrete classes with very few cases in most of them, or many unclassifiable cases, or both. In order for quantitative analysis and comparison to be meaningful, a fair amount of data must be available for each class, so I have discarded these alternative schemes.

In hindsight, as shown by the present analysis, there is good reason to allow a distinction at least between dignitaries of the ministerial type and the aristocratic one. However, the introduction of this distinction has resulted in the creation of the bureaucrat type, which does include some bureaucrats, but also has in its ranks people who defy the above pigeonholes, as well as people who probably belong to another class but have not been described in enough detail to indicate this clearly. In this way, the bureaucratic type of the dignitary class has much in common with the commoner class.

The moral of this is that a finer classification of foci is desirable in description metadata in order to facilitate analyses in pursuit of a variety of research questions. The smaller and more specific focus classes could then be joined into various kinds of metaclasses that are expedient to the research question at hand. This is in fact what I have done in the case of orbits, where the initial metadata recorded relationships quite precisely, but many of these specific relations were then merged into the metaclass of patriline for the analysis

<footnote n="72">72 She features in the *Interu grant of Bādapa*, a previously unedited grant which I intend to publish and discuss in the near future.</footnote>
presented here. Also depending on the actual research interest, some of the
small focus classes could and should be excluded from analysis, just as some or-
bits have been ignored in my above comparison of profiles for foci themselves,
their patriline and their lineage. While a much larger textual corpus would af-
ford analysis on some smaller classes, for the present, research questions tar-
geting small classes can only use quantitative analytical methodology explora-
tively, while for drawing any inferences, the established method of close read-
ing remains the primary tool.

4.3. Qualitative findings

This paper has focused on quantitative comparisons, but the set of codes and
their hierarchy of categories and dimensions is in itself a tangible outcome of
the qualitative stage of my analysis. The mere effort to code the attributions
made in the texts has forced me to pay more thorough attention to the sources
than I had done earlier. In this respect, the experience is similar to that of trans-
lating a text that one has edited. In the course of editing, one can accurately
judge what makes sense grammatically and semantically, even to the degree of
being able to propose emendations or non-standard interpretations that are
very likely to fit the original creator's intent better than what is indicated by
the letter of the received text or its interpretation according to standard rules.
Even so, the act of translating the text to another language forces one to take a
stand on many details that otherwise remain vague. For instance, when a San-
skrit inscription speaks of someone's *tejas*, it is possible to edit the relevant part
without considering whether and how *tejas* differs, say, from *ūrjas*, *śakti* or *kīrti*.
Such distinctions must, however, enter the translator's awareness at least when
they occur in proximity to one another. Even more so in coding, where proxim-
ity is less relevant, since the aim is to code concepts consistently throughout
the corpus and, when a word may indicate two or more concepts deemed to be
different, to establish criteria on the basis of which this distinction can be made.

This is why in the course of my iterated coding cycles I frequently found my-
self ruminating on what concepts various synonyms or conceptually related
words might have meant for the people who employed them in their composi-
tions and who read or heard them in those compositions. The outcomes of this
cognitive process are difficult to communicate in any form other than the re-
ductionistic list of codes and their definitions, but the actual experience is defi-
nitely a broadening one. For the three words noted above, I can say that at least
in the Eastern Cālukya *praśastis*, *tejas* and *ūrjas* seem to convey much the same
idea of active power or virility, whereas *kīrti*, reputation, is a completely
different concept even though “glory” is listed in dictionaries as a meaning for
both *tejas* and *kīrti*.

When it comes to organising individual codes into a hierarchy of themes,
vagueness and polyvalence are more acutely relevant than in attaching codes
to content. In a somewhat procrustean attempt to make use of all of the material
available to me, I have done my best to assign to a dimension every single at-
tribution made in the texts, while keeping the total number of dimensions man-
ageable and the individual dimensions passably discrete. It was also my ground
rule that each code can belong to one dimension only. I have repeatedly consid-
ered setting up a classification system in which some codes may contribute,
with perhaps different weights, to two or even more dimensions (so that, for
example, victory in battle might count toward belligerence, dominance, and
eminence), but I feel that the added complication involved in such a scheme
would not improve the analysis as much as it would reduce its transparency.

The set of twelve dimensions I have ended up with has proven satisfactory
for my present interest of exploring the projected personae of various kinds of
foci. However, the relative prevalence of dimensions varies widely, so minor di-
mensions (i.e. the ones less talked about in the texts, such as appeal and benef-
icence) cannot be effectively studied in profiles that also include such highly
prevalent dimensions as prestige. As in the classification of the persons being
described, so too in the categorisation of descriptive attributions it may be use-
ful to pursue quantitative comparison only or primarily for the major dimen-
sions, and to accept that the “miscellaneous” codes assigned to minor dimen-
sions are, at least with a corpus of this size, not readily accessible to this form of
textual analysis. Quantitative scrutiny of the minor dimensions on their own,
such as my exploration of the kinds of morality attributed to kings and under-
lings above, can, however, still serve as a useful exploratory step in the scalable
reading of the sources.

My set of dimensions is far from being the only, or even the best, way to
classify the content codes established for my corpus. Its purpose is not to reify
certain concepts, but to serve as a prop for exploration and understanding. At
least some of the dimensions, I feel, constitute fairly good models of actual
themes — clusters of closely associated concepts — in the minds of the original
recipients. The segregation of dominance, belligerence, and prowess, for exam-
ple, seems to work: although these three dimensions are conceptually related,
even this rudimentary analysis has shown that they are not always correlated
in representational personae. Other dimensions may be my own impositions
that do not really correspond to any emic theme. My label morality, for in-
stance, is quite likely to be extraneous, and the variation in the data could be
better understood by dividing morality into an ethical component and another component of *dharma* and duty.

Although I have incorporated dimensions and intermediate hierarchical levels into my code names, this was only done for practical purposes. The dimensions and categories need not be seen as intrinsic properties of the individual codes. As I suggested for the classification of foci, so too in the classification of codes, new groupings can be created with ease without having to re-code the texts. And here too, the classes do not need to encompass every single code, but can concentrate on those relevant to the research interest being pursued.

### 4.4. The applicability of textual analysis to copperplate charters

I have endeavoured to analyse the content of copperplate eulogies as it would have been perceived by the original audience of these texts in the historical context in which they were circulated, and inasmuch as it pertains to the representation of public personages. My underlying assumption has been that *praśastis* play a role in “crafting the king’s charisma” (Spencer 1984, 428), in other words that they intend to project the notion that the described persons (including but not limited to kings) conform to an ideal associated with their socio-political role and are therefore excellent candidates for that role. Through studying the thematic composition of these ideal schemata, I hoped to contribute to our understanding of how these roles were projected, perceived, and articulated in their original milieu.

Textual analysis has already proven highly applicable to studies of essentially similar nature. According to Krippendorff (2004, 75), “[c]ontent analyses are most successful when they focus on facts that are constituted in language, in the uses of the very texts” which are subjected to analysis. Such facts constituted in language include, among other kinds, “attribution of competence, character, morality, success, and belongingness to particular categories of people[, which] enables or discourages actions, makes or breaks politicians, creates heroes and demonizes villains, identifies leaders and marginalizes minorities” (ibid., 76). Most of this could be lifted verbatim into my above conceptualisation of *praśasti*.

Another reason why the method seems to fit the subject matter well is that the style of these eulogies tends to be highly formalised, to-the-point and coherent. If we were to compare this genre to the kinds of texts which are commonly subjected to textual analysis techniques, we would in this respect find them more similar to directed public opinion questionnaires and structured interviews than to columnist articles and press releases. Moreover, unlike the often incoherent, redundant, and elliptical natural language of survey and
interview responses, *praśastis* have been carefully engineered by their compos-
ers (and by the process of cultural evolution, in which more successful speci-
mens were imitated more) for efficiency: to deliver a maximum of characterisa-
tion with maximum clarity and optimum impact in a minimum of space. Indeed,
often they are hardly more than a list of simple statements attributing one qual-
ity after another to the person being described. Where complexity does crop up,
typically in the form of poetic stanzas elaborating a particular quality or char-
acterising action for greater impact, the intended message is still quite straight-
forward, largely devoid of prevarication and innuendo.

Nonetheless, in part precisely because of the deliberately maximised effi-
ciency of these texts, many of the concepts used in *praśasti* are rich with nuance
and connotation. Coding such concepts for meaning inevitably involves subjec-
tivity and potential bias. My familiarity with the expression of Eastern Cālukya
copperplate grants gained in the course of years spent editing these texts cer-
tainly helps in constructing meanings they would likely have communicated to
their intended audiences, but the reduction of complexity still comes at a price.
What makes textual analysis to some degree objective and empirical in despite
is the systematic design of a coding frame and consistency in its application to
all texts, paired with transparency in the reporting of the analysis.<fnref n="73" />

Coding is inevitably labour-intensive, and the labour must come from a qual-
ified scholar familiar with both the language and the textual corpus. The in-
vested time can be reduced to some extent with the aid of computer tools, but
as of now, there exists no out-of-the-box open-source software to accomplish
the kind of analysis that I have presented here. I have not experimented first-
hand with proprietary analytical software, but the commercial packages are
also unlikely to cater for all analytical needs. Moreover, all software — free or
commercial — comes with a fairly steep learning curve. Nonetheless, with the
wildfire spread and increasing accessibility of digital humanities, at the very
least digital corpora are increasingly available thanks to projects such as
DHARMA, and the possibility to integrate content-analytical coding into TEI-
encoded texts is within reach.

I do not claim that this methodology is in any way superior to a hermeneutic
close reading of the same texts or the bird's eye view of the historian, nor that
it should replace other approaches. Being more of a philologist than a historian,
I also make no attempt to pull the exposed details into a coherent and

<footnote n="73">73 See Krippendorff (2004, 316–21) for a detailed overview of the concern of validity primar-
ily in inferential content analysis, and Schreier (2012, 25–26) specifically in qualitative
analysis.</footnote>
comprehensive model. However, having tried textual analysis, I do believe there
is scope for further investigations using similar methods, which may be able to
enrich our knowledge by complementing, substantiating, refining, or question-
ing previous hypotheses, or even by turning up new insights. The quantitative
comparison of clearly demarcated large groups is the most strikingly informa-
tive and the most empirically grounded outcome of this kind of analysis. None-
theless, what I found even more intriguing than that was the ability to zoom in
on the ragged edges and back out again, and to slice my data in diverse ways to
see where differences occur and what criteria produce coherent groups. This
kind of scalable reading is perhaps the most profitable way to apply textual cod-
ing to copperplate eulogies.

Primary sources

See page xvi about references to primary sources in general, and page xvii about DHARMA digital editions with a corpus ID and a number.

Ākulamannaṇḍu grant of Bhīma II: VengiCalukya00034.

Ārumbāka grant of Bādapa: VengiCalukya00030.

Attili grant of Bhīma I: VengiCalukya00051.

Bezvāḍa plates of Bhīma I: VengiCalukya00024.

Cendalūr plates of Maṅgi Yuvarāja: VengiCalukya00050.

Cevuru plates of Amma I: VengiCalukya00027.

Diggubarru grant of Bhīma II: VengiCalukya00032.

Eḍeru plates of Amma I: VengiCalukya00028.

Guṇḍugolanu grant of Amma II: VengiCalukya00036.

Īnteru grant of Bādapa: VengiCalukya00070.

Kākamrāṇu grant of Bhīma I: VengiCalukya00025.

Kalucumbaru grant of Amma II: VengiCalukya00037.

Kāṭlaparru grant of Vijayāditya III: VengiCalukya00086.

Kolaveṇṇu plates of Bhīma II: VengiCalukya00033.

Koṇdaṇagūru grant of Indra Bhaṭṭāraka: VengiCalukya00053.

London plates of Maṅgi Yuvarāja: VengiCalukya00048.

Maliyapūṇḍi grant of Amma II: VengiCalukya00038.

Māṅgallu grant of Dānārṇava: VengiCalukya00039.

Masulipatam incomplete plates of Amma II: VengiCalukya00074.

Moga grant of Bhīma I: VengiCalukya00026.

Musinikuṇḍa grant of Viṣṇuwardhana III: VengiCalukya00080.

Nāgiyapūṇḍi grant of Amma II: VengiCalukya00041.

Paļaṁkaluru grant of Amma II: VengiCalukya00043.
Pedda-Gālīdiparru grant of Amma II: VengiCalukya00040.

Peddāpurappāḍu plates (set 1) of Viṣṇuvardhana II: VengiCalukya00056.

Peddāpurappāḍu plates (set 2) probably of Viṣṇuvardhana II: VengiCalukya00057.

Peṇukaparu grant of Jayasiṃha II: VengiCalukya00015.

Sātalūru plates of Vijayāditya III: VengiCalukya00069.

Śrīpūṇḍi grant of Tāļa II: VengiCalukya00031.

Masulipatam plates of Vijayāditya III: VengiCalukya00023.

VelaṁbaRRu grant of Amma I: VengiCalukya00063.

Vemalūrpāḍu plates of Amma II: VengiCalukya00047.

Zulakallu plates of Vijayāditya I: VengiCalukya00018.
DOI: 10.13173/9783447122306.093

This is an open access file distributed under the terms of the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
The terms of the CC licence apply only to the original material. The use of material from other sources such as charts, illustrations, photographs and text extracts may require further permission for use from the respective rights holder.
# Juxtaposed Genealogies of the Hoysaļas and their Subordinates

Samana Gururaja

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin,
Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

## 1. Introduction

The Hoysaļas were a family that ruled in what is now southern Karnataka and parts of present-day Tamil Nadu between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. First recognised as local rulers in Malenādu or the 'mountain region' in the Western Ghats, they were ennobled by the Cālukyas of Kalyāna as *mahāmaṇḍaleśvaras* or rulers of a circumscribed domain in the mid-eleventh century. In 1117, the third major ruler of the dynasty, Viṣṇuvardhana won an important battle against the Cōļas and reclaimed the city of Talakādu, which the Cōļas had occupied in 1004. This victory was important both materially and symbolically because Talakādu had been the seat of the Western Gaṅgas. The Hoysaļas made a concerted effort to mark themselves as the successors of this dynasty, which had ruled in southern Karnataka between the fifth and tenth centuries.

Following this important military victory, Viṣṇuvardhana commissioned the Vijayanārāyaṇa temple at Belur. The inscriptions that mark the establishment and endowment of this temple also contain the first formalised genealogy of the Hoysaļa dynasty, including their claim to descent from mythological heroes, and the origin story of the name Hoysaļa (Belur 58, Belur 71). This genealogy, with only minor variations, would become the standard adopted by the Hoysaļas and their subordinates in the inscriptions they commissioned for the next two centuries. When read at face value, the consistency of this narrative across time and geography indicates a deep loyalty of the subordinates to their overlords. However, subtle discrepancies in the choices made by the Hoysaļas and their subordinates contradict the absolute and totalising rhetoric the inscriptions imply.

In this paper I compare the instances where and when the subordinate genealogies aligned with the established narrative of the Hoysaļa family, and
where and when they deviated from it, to better understand the evolving relationship of the overlord and subordinate with the changing fortunes of each. I choose the words “overlord” and “subordinate” to highlight the relative status that individuals had to one another, rather than trying to locate them in absolute hierarchy, as suggested by terms like “feudatory” or “vassal.” There were several terms that delineated the role of a subordinate in a complex political structure, and while it is difficult to map the exact structure of these hierarchies from epigraphical material, what we can often determine is their position in relation to one another.

We learn of the history of the Hoysalas and their subordinates primarily through inscriptions in Kannada, a language still spoken in the present-day state of Karnataka. These inscriptions contained many registers: the eulogistic *praśasti* sections were composed either in Sanskrit or in a poetic register of Kannada replete with Sanskrit vocabulary, while the portion that recorded the actual donation employed more colloquial language. Commissioning an inscription awarded the donor of a grant the opportunity to record and celebrate the achievements of their ancestors. In shorter inscriptions this could include merely the identification of a memorialised warrior's parents, while longer inscriptions boasted elaborate narratives which celebrated the ancestry of the donor and the lineage of the overlord. It was through these narratives that donors positioned themselves politically, geographically, and cosmologically in relation to the world around them.

It was as subordinates to the Kalyāṇa Cālukyas that the Hoysalas emerged as prominent political actors, and during the joint rule of Vinayāditya and Ereyaṅga that subordinates of the Hoysalas in turn began to commission inscriptions of their own. Despite their growing influence, the Hoysalas continued to acknowledge and even celebrate their loyalty as subordinates to the Cālukyas until the late twelfth century when Ballāļa finally won independent sovereignty. Even after this, the achievements of Ereyaṅga and Vinayāditya as subordinates continued to be recorded as part of the Hoysalā genealogy. This contentious and somewhat contradictory relationship that the Hoysalas had with their own overlords is reflected in the ways they chose to represent themselves, but also in the relationships that they had with their subordinates and how these subordinates chose to represent them.
## 2. Standard expressions of loyalty in Kannada epigraphy

In the Kannada epigraphy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, subordinates expressed their loyalty to their overlords in a number of standardised ways. Inscriptions usually began with a regnal date, which identified the king ruling at the time of composition or at the time of the activity which the inscription commemorated. In shorter inscriptions, the acknowledgment of the overlord was limited to this date. In the case of longer inscriptions, this section could be extended to include royal genealogies and elaborate praise of the king and his ancestors. The inscription then proceeded to identify the subordinate of the king as *tat-pāda-padmopajīvin*, or ‘one sustained by his lotus feet,’ identified his subordinates as sustained by his lotus feet, and the hierarchy went on until the donor of the inscription and the donation was detailed. In some cases, this hierarchy was comprised of several levels, including the king, an intermediate regional ruler, and then a local ruler or administrator.

The different levels of the hierarchy were demarcated by a set of Sanskrit titles, which have been translated variously across regions. The Hoysaļas' rank of *mahāmaṇḍalēśvara* under the Cālukyas of Kalyāṇa is one example. Based on scattered references to the ceremonies that accompanied the conference of these titles, it is sometimes possible to discern their relation to one another. In the Cālukya polity, *mahāmaṇḍalēśvara* was the highest rank below the king himself, who was styled as the *mahārājādhirāja* or ‘king of kings.’ Ronald Inden describes a *maṇḍala* in the political context of early medieval India as a “circle of kings,” (Inden 1990, 229) and makes the distinction between the *mahārājādhirāja*, who ruled the “whole world,” and the *mahāmaṇḍalēśvara* who was the lord, *īśvara*, of a “circumscribed domain” or *maṇḍala* (ibid., 239). Similarly, the rank of *mahāsāmanta*, who acknowledged the overlordship of the ‘king of kings,’ was lower than that of *mahāmaṇḍalēśvara*, as discerned by ceremonies which marked the promotion of subordinates from the former to the latter.<fnref n="1" /> *Daṇḍanāyaka* was a more basic title for a military leader, which could be held in conjunction with several other descriptive and administrative titles, such as *sarvādhikārin*, *sandhivigrahin*, and *bhaṇḍārin*, roughly equivalent to universal administrator, “officer in charge of the foreign relations department who was often the writer

<footnote n="1">1 The inscription which provides evidence of this (Chiknayakanahalli 20) is discussed in detail below.</footnote>
of important documents,” (Sircar 1966, 295) and treasurer<fnref n="2" /> respectively. Lower in rank than these officials were the local administrators of smaller villages or groups of villages, namely *pergađe* and *gāvuńda*, and other members of society such as merchants, artisans, or female relatives of these officials.

During the time of the first Hoysaļa rulers, namely Nṛpakāma and Vinayāditya, there were fewer than five subordinates whose inscriptions are extant, and we can trace the progression from the earliest inscriptions — which were short and recorded the donations or memorialised the martial heroism of fairly minor actors<fnref n="3" /> — to a proliferation of titles and grants once the Hoysaļas became ennobled by the Cālukyas. It is at this time that subordinates began emerging with administrative titles which suggested a courtlike apparatus in the Hoysaļa polity.<fnref n="4" /> However, the inscriptions remained relatively basic until there was yet another drastic rise in their quantity and quality after Vişņuwardhana's conquest of Talakādu in 1117.

The *mahāmaṇḍalēśvaras* and the *mahāsāmantas* could either be members of the royal family who were given charge over a region, or local rulers who were ennobled with titles and grants from the ruling family. They therefore acted as intermediaries between the royal family and the local administration, and their self-representation often reflected a careful balance between these loyalties. In exchange for the revenue of taxed land, subordinates provided military service, embarking on expeditions on the king's behalf. The Hoysaļa ruler Ereyaṅga, for example, is regularly identified as the weaponised right arm of the Cālukya king or cālukya-bhūpālakana balada bhujā-daṇḍam (Shimoga 64), and celebrated for his victories stretching as far as Mālava in modern-day Madhya Pradesh (Belur 58, Belur 71).

<footnote n="2">2 There is considerable discussion about the exact meaning of these titles and their functions in different regional contexts. For the purposes of this argument, it is enough to understand them simply as administrative designations which subordinates held in addition to their martial roles.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 A heavily damaged hero stone dated 1027, found at Rajendrapura in the Manjarabad Taluk (Manjarabad 44), records that a warrior perished as he attacked Banavāsi on Nṛpakāma's orders. The text of the inscription is very brief and contains very little information either about Nṛpakāma or his subordinate.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 In a hero stone dated 1084, found at Neralige in the Arasikere Taluk (Arasikere 6), Vinayāditya's subordinate Bammayya is identified with the title *mahāsāmanta*, and a 1096 inscription at Kedagigere in the Kadur Taluk (Kadur 142) identifies Nāgadēva Nāyaka as the *mahāsandhivigrahin* when Vinayāditya was ruling with Ereyaṅga as his *yuvarāja* or heir apparent.</footnote>
These heavily embellished accounts of military success, and the emphatic language of complete loyalty and devotion of the subordinate to the overlord, led early scholars to the assumption of highly regimented models of state formation in which local rulers controlled sub-regions, which then fell under larger kingdoms over which the kings only had ritual authority.<fnref n="5" /> In exchange for the revenue and military support, the kings would provide the local rulers with marks of nobility and divine favour. However, closer examination of the genealogical portion of inscriptions reveals that even subordinate rulers, when given the chance to commission inscriptions and compose genealogies, made subtle deviations from the narratives of the same overlords to whom they swore complete loyalty.

The royal genealogy was primarily concerned with recording the progression of the male line. It therefore included only the successive kings and the mothers of their heirs. All other wives are only known through the inscriptions that they commissioned themselves. The histories of subordinate families were recorded in inscriptions only after first reinforcing the greatness of their overlord. Lengthier, more detailed inscriptions commissioned by subordinates therefore always contain a eulogy of the ruling family while the reverse is almost never the case. While beholden to record the genealogy of their overlords, the subtle deviations that subordinates chose in narrating their overlords' and their own family histories belie the totalising rhetoric of absolute loyalty the inscriptions themselves espouse, especially in the eulogistic portions. Although inscriptions may appear formulaic at first glance, subordinates made deliberate choices about how to represent both their own and their overlords' genealogies.

More recent scholarship<fnref n="6" /> therefore has begun to question the idea of a static model of governance in favour of a loose confederation of polities, the boundaries of which were in constant flux, and whose rulers functioned in complex, nested, and overlapping hierarchies. In this conception, the creation of genealogies which reflected the history and achievements of one's ancestors and relatives was a dialectical process by which political actors constituted and

<footnote n="5">5 Most relevant to the South Indian context specifically is Burton Stein's "segmentary state" model in which he argued that sub-regions of the Cōla polity, or nādu, were largely self-governed with only ritual affiliation to the imperial dynasties. The local authorities controlled the means of production, but the imperial forces dominated and exploited them through ritual power. This created an image of a self-sustained proletariat, so to speak, with royal families and their activities hovering above them, tenuously connected by ritual authority enforced by the Brāhmaṇas whom they deployed to shore up their authority outside of their core territory (Stein 1980).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 See Inden (1990), Heitzman (1997), Talbot (2001).</footnote>
reconstituted their identity with respect to these hierarchies. As Cynthia Talbot
notes in her work on the Kākatīyas of Andhra Pradesh, “although the conceptual
inequality inherent in the lord-underling relationship is never forgotten in the
rhetoric of inscriptions, it is clear that subordinates were active agents whose
accomplishments were admired and who engaged in their own forms of hon-
ouring overlords” (Talbot 2001, 150).

3. The Hoysaļa genealogy

The genealogy of the Hoysaļa family as presented in the inscription *Belur 58*, dated 1117,<fnref n="7" /> provides a very linear understanding of the family’s descent. It was among the first Hoysaļa inscriptions discovered in the nineteenth century; the lineage found therein formed the basis of early historiography on the Hoysaļas. The narrative begins by describing the descent of the Hoysaļas from Purāṇic figures — Atri, Purūravas, Nahuśa, and Yayāti — and proceeds to identify the dynasty as descendants of Yadu and the Yādava lineage. As William Coelho notes in his foundational monograph on the dynasty, a “cursory examination of the inscriptions reveals the fact that almost all the dynasties of the south claimed Purāṇic descent in about the 11th century A.D.” (Coelho 1950, 7). These narratives of divine and semi-divine descent allowed new dynasties to stake claim to prominence in a recognisable cosmology, through “texts that formed part of an integrated discursive practice” (Ali 2000, 176). By connecting themselves to Purāṇic figures, and in turn connecting those Purāṇic ancestors to local ones, they positioned themselves both as being strongly rooted in the land and powerful enough to be connected to the universally acknowledged cosmology of the *Purāṇas*.

In the Hoysaļa case, the Purāṇic ancestors are very loosely connected to the
local, mythical ancestor Saļa merely by identifying him as a descendant of the
Yādava lineage. The story of Saļa follows this general contour: in the town of
Sosēvūr (in Kannada) or Śaśakapura (in Sanskrit), an ascetic was attacked by a
tiger as he was meditating. Saļa, his pupil and a local warrior, jumped to fight
the tiger, at which point the ascetic shouted, “Poy, Saļa!” meaning “strike, Saļa.”
Saļa successfully slew the tiger. The ascetic blessed him with sovereignty over
the land. Although some effort was made in very early historiography to

<footnote n="7">7 This inscription is found on an interior wall of the Cennakēśava/Viyajanārāyana temple at Belur, and an almost exact replica of its contents is recorded in the copperplate inscription *Belur 71*, which was also found in the same temple.</footnote>
identify Saļa with a historical figure, it has since been widely accepted that this
narrative was invented to explain the family name Hoysalļa, or the older Poysalļa.
It also serves to highlight the origin of the Hoysalļa family as ‘hill chiefs’ or
malepar, an attribute of their lineage which they continued to celebrate
throughout their reign.

According to the genealogy, Vinayāditya was a distant descendant of Saļa.
Recognised with the epithet, ‘lord of hill chiefs’ or maleparoći gaṇḍa, he moved his
capital from Śaśakapura in the Western Ghats to Belur and eventually Dōra-
samudra (present day Halebidu) in the plains. He is the first historical Hoysalļa
ruler identified in the genealogy. His primary queen was Keleyabbe, and they
had a son named Ereyaṅga, who is celebrated in the genealogy for his military
expeditions on behalf of the Kalyaṇa Cālukya king Vikramāditya VI. Ereyaṅga in
turn had three sons: Ballāļa, Viṣṇuwardhana, and Udayāditya. Ballāļa, as the eld-
est son, succeeded Ereyaṅga but died shortly thereafter, upon which his
younger brother Viṣṇuwardhana assumed the throne. It is this Viṣṇuwardhana
who commissioned the Belur inscriptions in which this genealogy is first rec-
orded.

Successive generations continued to use this narrative and build on it, re-
sulting in the genealogy visible in Figure 1. Over the years, several variations
entered the Saļa origin story, including the identification of the ascetic as a Jaina
teacher named Sudatta and the inclusion of the local goddess Vāsantikādēvī into
the narrative, sometimes as a quelled opponent of Saļa and other times as the
deity who recognised his virtue and bestowed sovereignty upon him.<fnref n="8" /> The Hoy-
salas made their roots in the mountain region, or malēnāḍu, a foundational ele-
ment in their origin story. The mythological portion of their genealogy, includ-
ing their Purāṇic descent and the story of their ancestor Saļa, worked to simul-
taneously position them in a broader cosmology and to reiterate their local
roots.

<footnote n="8">8 For details on the variations of this story in different inscriptions, see Joshi (1946), Coelho (1950, 13–16).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_30.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1. The Hoysaļa genealogy</figcaption></figure>
In emphasising the greatness of the dynasty, the established royal genealogy gave the entire credit for military victories to its kings. For example, Visnudhvana is credited with the victory over the Colas at Talakadu in the Belur inscription, and is from then on referred to with the epithet, talakadu-gonda, or 'one who made Talakadu his own.' Only from the inscriptions of a subordinate named Gangaraja do we learn that he too played a vital role in the 1117 conquest.<fnref n="9" />

Another noteworthy discrepancy in the Hoysala genealogy as represented by the inscriptions of Gangaraja and his family is the explicit mention of Nrypakama. An 1120 inscription — marking Gangaraja's establishment of a basadi, or Jaina temple, at Sravana BelgoLA — mentions that his father Eciraja had been in the service of Nrypakama.<fnref n="10" /> Nrypakama does not appear in the genealogy commissioned by Visnukuvadhana at Belur, which goes straight to Vinayaditya from the mythical SaLa. The Belur inscription identifies the Hoysalas' place of origin as Sashakapura in Sanskrit, or Soservur in Kannada. This town was later identified as present-day Angadi in the Chikmagalur District. Located on the slopes of the Western Ghats, it is the findspot for a number of the earliest inscriptions of the Hoysala dynasty. Only through these inscriptions do we learn of Nrypakama, Vinayaditya's father.

According to these early-eleventh-century inscriptions, Nrypakama's reign predated the Cālukyas' ennoblement of the Hoysalas to mahāmandalesvara. In the inscriptions of the time, it was common for subordinates to identify themselves by using the name or epithet of their overlord before their own name. For example, the Hoysalas first became subordinates of the Kalyāṇa Cālukyas under the king Sōmēśvara I whose epithet was Trailokyamalla. His subordinates would use the epithet Trailokyamalla before their own names to acknowledge their subordination: Trailokyamalla Hoysala, Trailokyamalla Pāṇḍya etc.<fnref n="11" /> In the Sosēvūr inscriptions however, we find the Hoysala ruler styled with the epithets rakkasa and rācamalla, the names of the last Gaṅga rulers.

<footnote n="9">9 Both a stone slab inscription placed in a doorway on the doḍḍa beṭṭa or “big hill” of Sravana Bełgoła (Śravana Bełgoła 240) and an 1117 inscription carved into the hill at Tippur in the Malavalli Taluk (Malavalli 31) recount the details of the battle in great detail, where Gangaraja marched against the Cola mahāsāmanta Adiyama in a surprise attack and caused him to flee, “uniting the whole nādu under the dominion of a single umbrella.”</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 Nrypakama is thought to have reigned from 1022-1047, while Gangaraja commissioned this inscription in 1120. Although this suggests rather long careers of both father and son, I am assuming that Eciraja served under Nrypakama towards the end of his reign, and that Gangaraja was an older subordinate of Visnukuvadhana. This tracks with Gangaraja playing an important role in the conquest of Talakadu.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 See, for example, Chikmagalur 15, in which Vinayaditya is identified with the title mahā- mandalēśvara and the epithet Trailokyamalla, borrowed from the Cālukya king Sōmēśvara I.</footnote>
The Gaṅga dynasty ruled southern Karnataka from the fifth to the early eleventh century. The region which the Hoysaṇas ruled as subordinates of the Cālukyas was named Gaṅgavāḍi after this family. In 1004, however, they were unseated from their capital at Talakāḍu, southeast of modern-day Mysuru (Mysore), by the Cōlas. Branches of the family continued to appear in inscriptions, but as subordinates to the Kalyāṇa Cālukyas, ruling under them in the Banavāsi region.

Coelho assumes the relationship between the Hoysaṇas and the Gaṅgas to be fairly straightforward, where the Hoysaṇas, once subordinates to the Gaṅgas, later styled themselves as their successors when the Gaṅga dynasty fell from power. However, closer examination of the inscriptions reveals that the Gaṅgas had an extremely tenuous relationship with the mountainous region where the Hoysaṇas originated. The only Gaṅga inscriptions found in this region are in Coorg, and cite the malepar or mountain-chiefs as the protectors of a grant made by the Gaṅga king. One of these inscriptions (Coorg 2), discovered at a town called Peggur and dated to 978, corresponds with the rule of Rācamalla IV and his brother, Rakkasa. These are also the epithets which the early Hoysaṇas, Nṛpakāma and Vinayāditya used in their inscriptions.

An inscription (Mudgere 19) recording a grant from 1025, found close to Sosēvūr, for example, identifies Nṛpakāma with the title Rācamalla Vermmāḍi, and a 1063 inscription (Mudgere 13) located outside the Jaina temple at Sosēvūr declares that the Hoysaļa king had the syllables ra-kka-sa-voy-sa-ļan emblazoned on this flag. The appearance of these rulers' names before Hoysaļa indicates that the Hoysaṇas at this time positioned themselves as subordinates to the by then displaced Gaṅga dynasty. With their ennoblement by the Kalyāṇa Cālukyas, however, they began to claim the titles of the Gaṅga sovereigns and style themselves as Gaṅga kings rather than subordinates. When the then Cālukya prince, Vikramāditya VI, was stationed at Banavāsi, ruling the region on behalf of his father, Sōmēśvara I, he took on the titles of the erstwhile Gaṅga kings. It is likely therefore, that the Cālukyas bestowed this title on the Hoysaṇas when they ennobled them to the position of mahāmaṇḍaleśvara over the region of Gaṅgavāḍi.

This is most likely the reason that Viṣṇuwardhana, when he commissioned the first royal genealogy, chose to omit Nṛpakāma and begin the lineage with Vinayāditya, the first Hoysaļa to bear the title of mahāmaṇḍaleśvara. However, Viṣṇuwardhana's subordinate Gaṅgarāja chose to retain the record of Nṛpakāma's rule in order to recall his father's service to the Hoysaļa family before his own, which provides a slightly different picture of the Hoysaļa genealogy. In the following sections, I illustrate how this desire to record certain details of the family's history, despite deviation from genealogy commissioned by the royal family, came to depend on the time a subordinate family spent in service to the
Hoysalas, their distance from the Hoysala nexus of power, and the fortunes of the Hoysala family themselves over time.

## 4. Subordinates with generational ties to the Hoysalas

Like Gaṅgarāja, there were many subordinates who boasted generations-long associations with and service to the Hoysala family. Gaṅgarāja, while commissioning inscriptions under Viṣṇuvardhana's patronage, celebrated his father's service to Viṣṇuvardhana's great-grandfather Nṛpakāma. Similarly, other subordinate families who first commissioned inscriptions under Viṣṇuvardhana systematically recorded how their ancestors had served previous generations of Hoysala kings.

One of the most detailed accounts of such a generational association comes from a family who claimed affiliation with the Hoysalas starting with the reign of Vinayāditya. I call them the Mariyāne family after their patriarch. I have reconstructed the genealogy of this family (Figure 2) primarily from their two longest inscriptions: a mid-twelfth-century stone slab inscription from Sindigere in the Chikmagalur District, which records the family's relationship with the Hoysalas from Vinayāditya to Viṣṇuvardhana (Chikmagalur 160), and another stone slab inscription dated 1184, found near the entrance of a village called Alisandra, which extends the genealogy two generations further and records a grant made during the rule of Ballāla II (Nagamangala 32). There are several shorter inscriptions which make mention of this family, but they provide supplementary information to the chronology that emerges in the inscriptions at Sindigere and Alisandra.

The older Sindigere inscription was commissioned towards the end of Viṣṇuvardhana's reign in the late 1130s. The inscription relates the family's intergenerational relationship on the one hand with the Hoysalas, and on the other with the town of Sindigere. The Alisandra inscription shows us how the family's own fortunes grew with those of their overlords — they continued to renew their rule over Sindigere and maintain the Jaina temples there, but also commissioned a Jaina temple at Alisandra, then Anuvasamudra, to mark the new territories under their rulership. While the cluster of inscriptions among which the above Sindigere inscription is found is closer to the central nexus of the Hoysalas, the Alisandra inscription is closer to Mysuru and shows that the Hoysalas' territorial expansion reflected in the increased dominion of their subordinates over time. Both inscriptions contain the same narrative, which marks the repeated renewal of the relationship between the Mariyāne family and the town of Sindigere, in conjunction with an event that marked a new connection to the Hoysala family.
<figure><img src="image_31.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2. *The Mariyāne family tree*</figcaption></figure>
In both inscriptions, the first Hoysaṇa king mentioned is Vinayāditya. According to the account, his senior queen Keleyabbe accepted a military envoy named Mariyāne as her younger brother, and she and Vinayāditya performed the kanyādāna or ‘gift of the bride’ at his marriage, along with the bhūmidāna, or ‘gift of land,’ of Sindigere. Both inscriptions provide a date for this event, though they differ slightly — 1047 in the Sindigere inscription and 1045 in the Alisandra inscription — and record that it took place in Sosēvūr, the earliest residence of the Hoysaṇas in the Western Ghats (*Chikmagalur* 160, ll. 9–10).

The inscriptions go on to record that the oldest grandson of Vinayāditya, Ballāa I, married three highly accomplished daughters of the Mariyāne family in 1103 (*Chikmagalur* 160, ll. 15–18). At the wedding in Belur, Sindigere was re-granted to the family in payment of the *molevāla rṇa*, ‘debt of breastmilk.’ The Sindigere inscription stops detailing the relationship between the Hoysaṇas and the Mariyāne family at this generation. It then proceeds with praise of the king Viṣṇuvardhana and identifies two brothers from the Mariyāne family as his sub-ordinates – Mariyāne II and his younger brother Bharata. The inscription then begins narrating their lineage and identifies an ancestor of the Mariyāne family, Dākarasa, who served both the Hoysaṇas and their predecessors, the Gaṅga dyn-asty.<fnref n="12" /> Although this mention is relatively short when compared to the vast amount of the genealogy that does correspond with the established narrative of the Hoysaṇas, the assertion that their ancestor was already a distinguished lord (*prabhu*) under the Gaṅgas emphasised the Mariyāne family’s local prominence with the implication that it preceded the advent of their Hoysaṇa overlords and would therefore likely outlast them.

In these deviances from the Hoysaṇa line — both in the case of Gaṅgarāja mentioning his father’s service to Nṛpakāma, who remained unacknowledged in the Hoysaṇa genealogy, and in the mention of Dākarasa’s service to both the Hoysaṇa and Gaṅga families in the Mariyāne family’s case — I see two important signs. First, it was a politically and financially weighted act to commission an inscription, whether it be for the establishment of a new temple or even just for donations to an existing one. Judging by the limited number of inscriptions from a single subordinate family, these endowments were rare chances to record the family history. Later generations therefore bore the responsibility to account for their families’ compounded loyalty to the overlord’s family over genera-tions. Second, these families and their local ties often pre-dated the dynasty to whom they swore loyalty. Deviation from the established royal genealogy, in

<footnote n="12">12 *Chikmagalur* 160, l. 63: *gaṅga-rājya-poysaṇa-rājyakk’ ēka prabhuvene negaḍam ḍākarasa daṇḍanātha.*</footnote>
particular, was a way to express that they would remain successfully tied to the land whether or not the fledgling dynasty ultimately established itself.

As it happens, the Hoysaṇas did go on to achieve greater territorial success and firmly plant themselves as rulers of the region, first as subordinates to the Cālukyas of Kalyāṇa and then under Ballāla II as independent sovereigns after his defeat of the Cālukyas in 1189. The later Alisandra inscription of 1184 allows us to see the progress of the Mariyāne family in conjunction with the growing fortunes of the Hoysaṇas. It records achievements of further generations of the Mariyāne family, and provides details about members of its many branches. For example, the inscription describes the marital relationships between the Mariyāne family and that of Gaṅgarāja. Gaṅgarāja is recognised as the *maiduna*, or sister's husband to Mariyāne I, while his son Boppadēva was the *maiduna* to Mariyāne II and his brother Bharata I (Nelamangala 32, ll. 27–33). According to the inscription, these brothers (also the donors of the Sindigere inscription) named their son Biṭṭidēva after the king Visṇuvardhana, and in exchange for a tribute of 1000 *hon* (a unit of gold), renewed their lordship over Sindigere. In addition, they were also given two more territories, namely Baggavaṇi and Diṇḍiganakere. During the reign of Narasiṃha I, the brothers paid a tribute of 500 *hon* to renew their lordship over all three places.

Finally, the Alisandra inscription discusses the rule of Ballāla II when Bharata II and his younger brother Bāhubali renewed the grant and their lordship of all three places in 1183. This corresponds with the date of the inscription, which records that during the *mahādāna* or ceremony of the ‘great gift’ following the birth of Ballāla’s son, Narasiṃha II, the two brothers renewed their previous grants and provided funds for the services of the *basadi* they established at Anuvasamudra. They once again tied the renewal of their grants to a major event in the Hoysaṇa family.

In this later inscription, though the genealogy beginning with the ancestor Dākarasa is mentioned, the detail about his service to the Gaṅga dynasty no longer features. By this time therefore, the Mariyāne family was content to be recognised solely through their connections to the Hoysaṇas and the network of subordinates that fell under their overlordship. Along with the ongoing and evolving relationship with the Hoysaṇa family, the genealogy in both inscriptions also traces the movement of the dynasty geographically, from their town of origin at Sosēvūr to Belur and finally to Dōrasamudra. At the same time, the Alisandra inscription shows the Mariyāne family’s acquisition of new territories as their relationship with the Hoysaṇas was sustained across generations.

The genealogy of the Hoysaṇas as presented by the Mariyāne family echoes the official royal genealogy, but for the brief mention of their ancestor’s
lordship under Gaṅga rule. Like the established royal genealogy, and unlike in the inscriptions of Gaṅgarāja, it omits Nṛpakāma. This shows that even over the short duration of Viṣṇuvardhana's reign, there was an increased alignment between the narratives commissioned by the royal family and the powerful subordinates close to them. We see that both the Mariyāne family and Gaṅgarāja had associations with the Hoysalas generations before the reign and victory of Viṣṇuvardhana, but it was the resources and recognition that victory brought which allowed them to quite literally set that history in stone. The mention of figures outside the established Hoysalas genealogy reflects the precarity of aligning themselves entirely with the new dynasty, but as time went on and the Hoysalas' position grew more secure, even the small reference to their connection to the Gaṅgas disappeared.

To further illustrate this pattern, Kēśirāja, a subordinate of Ballāļa II who commissioned a much later inscription in the early thirteenth century, makes the explicit claim that his lineage came into being alongside that of the Hoysalas.<fnref n="13" /> In concurrence with this claim, the inscription in Agrahara Balguli found on the wall of a temple and dated 1210 (Chennarayapatna 244), lists each successive generation of Kēśirāja's family serving a successive generation of the Hoysalā family. Rāma-daṇḍādhipa served Vinayāditya, and his son Śrīdhara-daṇdanātha was Ereyaṅga's eminent minister (mantri lalāmaṁ). Śrīdhara had three sons, Mallidēva, Dāmarāja, and Kēśavarāja. As leaders of the army (mukhya sēnādhipar) they participated in the expansion of Viṣṇuvardhana's kingdom. Further, Mallidēva's sons were Mādhava, Dvijēndrōpama, Beṭṭarasa, and Dāma who served under Narasiṁha I. To Beṭṭarasa and his wife Lakṣmī were born five sons and one daughter in Ballāļa II's kingdom. The inscription states that all of these children went on to distinguish themselves in Ballāļa's kingdom, but proceeds to describe only the descendants of Kēśava (Kēśirāja) and Mallapa (Mallidēva).

The Agrahara Balguli inscription lauds Kēśirāja as one of the most prized ministers of Ballāļa's court, and describes his extensive construction of temples and tanks, and his establishment of agrahāras in Nallūr, Tałirūr, Bāgiyūr, Bālagarcche, and Bełgali. The inscription also includes imagery describing the splendor of Ballāļa's court or āsthāna, and Kēśirāja is praised as appearing like a ruby among gems in Ballāļa's court. He also has the title of mahāpradhāna, and the inscription describes in detail the creation of the Kēśavapura agrahāra in a village formerly known as Bełgali in the Nirguṇḍa-nāḍ. Having received the village as a grant from the king, he built two reservoirs named Kēśavasamudra and

<footnote n="13">13 Chennarayapatna 244, l. 7: end āytu poysaļānvayam and āytu kēśirājan' anvayam.</footnote>
Lakṣmīsamudra, and established the deity Kēśavēśvara, for whose rituals several individuals made donations.

An inscription from 1249 (Chikmagalur 20), from the reign of Hoysaļa Sōmēśvara I, the grandson of Ballāļa II, records the ongoing genealogy of Kēśirāja's family. The portion that records the Hoysaļa genealogy and their relationship with it, however, is greatly attenuated and begins only with Viṣṇuwardhana rather than with Vinayāditya. By this time, subordinate families were apparently content to associate exclusively with the Hoysaļa family, without any deviation from the official Hoysaļa version of their genealogy. There were no claims to prior association as Kēśirāja's family is literally described as having emerged along with the Hoysaļas. The Hoysaļas' growing political influence is reflected in the way the subordinates geographically closest to them no longer felt the need to claim associations other than with their overlords as the Hoysaļas became the uncontested rulers of Gaṅgavāḍi over the course of the twelfth century.

## 5. The Huliyar Family: Service to multiple royal families

The last family I examine shows that even this trend was not universal and there was a variable apart from time which determined the genealogical narratives of subordinate families: distance. The Huliyar family — I call them that because of their generations-long association with the town of Huliyar in modern day Tumkur District — were a family of subordinates that first appear in inscriptions during the reign of Viṣṇuwardhana in the mid-twelfth century, and continue to be active through successive generations (Figure 3). They owed their ability to commission inscriptions and record their genealogy to Hoysaļa patronage; however, they celebrated the varied affiliation of their ancestors to multiple ruling households. Huliyar rests on the border between three districts, namely Hassan, Chikmagalur, and Tumkur. In the early medieval period, this would have been in the Noļambavāḍi region, which only came under Hoysaļa overlordship in the reign of Viṣṇuwardhana. The inscriptions associated with the family range from the mid-twelfth to the mid-thirteenth century.

The earliest inscription of this family, Arasikere 55 from 1143, identifies one Gōyidēva with the epithet, huliyēra puravarādhiśvara, or lord of the town of Huliyera. The genealogy of the family begins with his ancestor, only identified by his titles — in most cases sthira gambīra — and later named Kariyabamma in the inscription Kadur 30 from the 1170s. Multiple inscriptions relate the same account where he earned titles for his service and achievements in different courts. He earned the first title, vīra-taļa-prahāri (Kadur 30) or gaṇḍa-taļa-prahāri
(Kadur 35),<fnref n="14" /> because he defended the Noļamba king's senior queen,<fnref n="15" /> Śrīdēvī, when enemies attacked and abducted her. The second, he obtained due to his great skill in battle. As though killing for sport, he slew the great warrior, Doḍḍanka in the Cālukya king Āhavamalla's camp, thereby gaining the title of doḍḍanka baḍīva, or one who strikes in the great battlefield.<fnref n="16" />

There are two possible explanations for the shift in Kariyabamma's affiliation here. On the one hand, he might have travelled to different courts in search of a patron. However, I think it is more likely, given the family's ongoing connection with Huliyar, that this shift reflected the changing rulership of the locality. While the family remained relatively established in the region, what changed was the suzerain to whom they owed allegiance. This is supported by the fact that the first Hoysaļa ruler the family served was Viṣṇuvardhana, which corresponds with the latter's eastward territorial expansion, and with Viṣṇuvardhana's and Ballāļa I's defeat of the Pāṇḍyas of Uccaṅgi in the early twelfth century.

Unlike the families discussed in the previous section, the Huliyar family continued to celebrate their allegiance to the Noļamba Pallavas and the Cālukyas of Kalyāņa well into the twelfth century when Hoysaļa power was more established and subordinates like the Mariyāne family allowed their identity to be entirely subsumed under the Hoysaļa genealogy. Gōyidēva's father, Bhīma, gained acclaim in Viṣṇuvardhana's court and it was ultimately Narasiṁha I who gave Gōyidēva the position — not only in his ancestral Huliyar but also in Arasikere, closer to the centre of Hoysaļa power (Arasikere 55) — which allowed him to first record the family history. This earliest inscription describes Gōyidēva as Narasiṁha’s “right hand,” but that did not compromise Gōyidēva’s pre-rogative to record his ancestors’ achievements under multiple rulers.

<footnote n="14">14 Rice (1901, 6) translates gaṇḍa-taļa-prahāri as “slapper on the cheek” in Kadur 30 but I suggest that taļa-prahāri translates to ‘the one who struck with his palm,’ in reference to the fact that Kariyabamma apparently quelled the enemies who had abducted the Noļamba queen with just the open palm of his hand (see note 15 below); vīra and gaṇḍa are prefixes, meaning ‘valorous one’ and ‘lord’ respectively.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 Arasikere 55, ll. 16–18: sthira-gambhīra-noļamban agra-mahiṣi śrīdēviyaṁ tadviśōtkarar ant āgaṇḍe bandu bandi viḍiyal tad vairi saṅghātamaṁ| bharadind eydi taļa prahāradoṇḍe koṇḍ and ittan ā bhūpan ā daradiṁ vīra-taļa-prahāri-vesaram dhātrī-taļam baṇṇisal|].</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 Arasikere 55, ll. 18–20: cāļukyāhavamalla nṛpālana kaṭakadoṇḍe kondu doḍḍaṇkamumaṁ līleyoṇḍe paḍedan adaṭam pālisi doḍḍaṇḍa baḍīvan emb ī birūḍam.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_32.png" /></figure>

DOI: 10.13173/9783447122306.165

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Kariyabamma and his wife Murdiyakka, who is again identified by name only in a much later inscription (Kadur 36), had one son, Āhavamalla. Subordinates often named their children after their overlord, and Āhavamalla was the epithet of the Cālukya king Sōmēśvara I, at whose camp Kariyabamma also gained his second title. Sōmēśvara I was also the overlord of the early Hoysaļas in the late eleventh century, so it is likely that these local rulers came under the Cālukya umbrella around the same time. This also helps us date Kariyabamma to the early to mid-eleventh century, which is when Sōmēśvara I lived and ruled.

Āhavamalla and his wife Honnavve had two sons, Bhīma and Māca, who are never mentioned together in the same inscription. It is only through their common identification of their father and grandfather that I was able to deduce their relationship by reading across multiple inscriptions. Both lines had among their ranks important subordinates, especially to Ballāļa II, his son Narasiṁha II, and his grandson Sōmēśvara. Bhīma gained the title of *sitagara gaṇḍa*, or ‘lord/conqueror of the unchaste,’ from Viṣṇuwardhana. In rendering the accomplishments of their lineage, various members of the family recalled the family’s service not only to the Hoysaļa rulers but also to the Noļamba-Pallavas and the Kalyāṇa Cālukyas. Their geographical location in Noļambavāḍi meant that they existed on the periphery of the Hoysaļa polity. It was therefore more important to them to celebrate their loyalty to multiple ruling families and emphasise their continuing presence in the area surrounding Huliyar.

Bhīma's son Gōyidēva is the most prolific member of this family, followed closely by his brother, Caṭṭa. They ruled Huliyar and the nearby Magare in the 1130s. Gōyidēva outlived Narasiṁha I to serve Ballāļa II, and in honour of this, named his son Ballāļanāyaka. Members of several different branches of the family have inscriptions around the same area, within a twenty-mile radius of Huliyar. In an inscription from the Channarayapatna District, Gōyidēva's brother Caṭṭa's son Biṭṭidēvan identifies Ballāļanāyaka as his younger brother (anuja), showing that the different branches of the family acknowledged their relationships (Chiknayakanahalli 21, Chiknayakanahalli 32).

A stone inscription of 1188, found at Yadagatta in the Chiknayakanahalli Taluk, records Ballāļanāyaka's promotion from the title *mahāsāmanta* — which his father and previous ancestors held in Huliyar — to *mahāmaṇḍalika*.17 The transition here, from *sāmanta* to *maṇḍalika*, showed both that Ballāļa ennobled his namesake in recognition of his family's longstanding connection with the region — over at least three generations — and that the ambit of Hoysaļa territory

<footnote n="17">17 Chiknayakanahalli 20, ll. 24–26: idirānta-vairi-nṛparam kadanadoļ irid' ikki vīra-hoysaņa meccalu mudadiṁ balleya-nāyakan odavida maṇḍalika-padaviyaṁ nere paḍedan.</footnote>
was growing: they were in control of a large enough territory around Huliyar to warrant a higher-ranked officer there. An inscription from around the same time identifies his wife, Māraladēvi with the titles of *piriyarasi* and *pattamahādēvi* (Chiknayakanahalli 14), senior queen and crowned consort, respectively. By ennobling Ballālanāyaka, Ballāla thus raised the status of the entire family. As later inscriptions attest, descendants of the Huliyar family continued to carry the title *mandalika* well into the thirteenth century. In one inscription from 1232 found on a stone at a temple in the village of Heggere, Gōyidēva's brother's son and Ballālanāyaka's paternal cousin Kappayya is seen holding the title (Chiknayakanahalli 27).

In later inscriptions of the family from the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, after the promotion of Ballālanāyaka to *mandalika*, the genealogy of the family changes. In these inscriptions, the narrative begins from Bhīma — the same ancestor who first gained renown in Visnupardhana's court (Chiknayakanahalli 13, Chiknayakanahalli 14). This illustrates a similar pattern to the subordinates who were closer to the Hoysalas geographically, although on a delayed timeline. Once they were secure in the prospects of the Hoysala family in their ancestral locality, they were willing to allow their identities to be entirely defined by the relationship with their overlords.

## 6. Conclusion

Comparing the genealogies of the Hoysalas and their subordinates shows us that though the rhetoric of the inscriptions themselves supported the idea of the subordinates' complete loyalty to their overlords, the deviations in their genealogies and accounts of their family's achievements belies this totalising rhetoric. Instead, it exposes us to a political world in which subordinates had a significant amount of autonomy in how they chose to tell the stories of their ancestors, even when it deviated from the established royal genealogy. However, the evidence also illustrates that the way subordinate families saw and represented the Hoysalas changed depending on the security of the family's fortunes and their distance from the nexus of Hoysala rule. Therefore, the subordinate families could either see the Hoysalas as one of the many royal families their ancestors served, or — with time and increased faith in the Hoysalas' own fate — allow their identity and their history to be entirely subsumed within that of the Hoysalas.

The political and military position of the Hoysalas therefore determined the way their subordinates represented the royal genealogy as well as their own,
which in turn allows us a glimpse into the inclusions and omissions that went into the process of composing a genealogy. Rather than being merely a record of events, as early epigraphists tended to understand them, they were the product of continuing choices based on the fortunes and relationships of the various families involved.

## Primary sources

See page xvi about references to primary sources.

* Arasikere 6: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 5.1 (Rice 1902a).

* Arasikere 55: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 5.1 (Rice 1902a).

* Belur 58: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 5.1 (Rice 1902a).

* Belur 71: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 5.1 (Rice 1902a).

* Chennarayapatna 244: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 5.1 (Rice 1902a).

* Chikmagalur 15: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 6 (Rice 1901).

* Chikmagalur 20: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 6 (Rice 1901).

* Chikmagalur 160: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 6 (Rice 1901).

* Chiknayakanahalli 13: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 12 (Rice 1904b).

* Chiknayakanahalli 14: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 12 (Rice 1904b).

* Chiknayakanahalli 20: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 12 (Rice 1904b).

* Chiknayakanahalli 21: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 12 (Rice 1904b).

* Chiknayakanahalli 27: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 12 (Rice 1904b).

* Chiknayakanahalli 32: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 12 (Rice 1904b).

* Coorg 2: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 1 rev. (Rice 1914).

* Kadur 30: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 6 (Rice 1901).

* Kadur 35: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 6 (Rice 1901).

* Kadur 36: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 6 (Rice 1901).

* Kadur 142: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 6 (Rice 1901).

* Malavalli 31: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 3 (Rice 1894).

* Manjarabad 44: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 5.1 (Rice 1902a).

* Mudgere 13: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 6 (Rice 1901).

* Mudgere 19: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 6 (Rice 1901).

* Nagamangala 32: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 4 (Rice 1898).

* Nelamangala 32: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 8 (Rice 1904a).

* Shimoga 64: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 7 (Rice 1902b).

* Šravaņa Belgoļa 240: *Epigraphia Carnatica* 2 (Rice and Narasimhachar 1923).
DOI: 10.13173/9783447122306.165

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# The Central Indian Yādava Dynasty: Epigraphic Self-Representation versus Hemādri's Account

Annette Schmiedchen

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin,
Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

## 1. Introduction

Medieval rulers called Yādavas are referred to in numerous inscriptions from Maharashtra and northern Karnataka dating from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries, as well as in the *Vratakhaṇḍa* of the *Caturvargacintāmaṇi*, composed by an author named Hemādri, a minister at the court of the Yādavas in the thirteenth century. Based on the epigraphic material, two lines of the Yādava dynasty can be distinguished (Table 1): an early one with the capital at Sindīnagara, present-day Sinnar near Nasik in western Maharashtra (850–1100), and a late one with the capital at Devagiri, present-day Daulatabad in the Aurangabad District of central Maharashtra (1100–1320).

<table><caption>Table 1. Inscriptions of the Yādava period</caption><tr><td rowspan="2">Early Yādavas</td><td>850 – 1000</td><td>no inscriptions extant</td></tr><tr><td>1000 – 1100</td><td>copperplate charters</td></tr><tr><td rowspan="2">Late Yādavas</td><td>late 12th – mid-13th century</td><td>stone inscriptions</td></tr><tr><td>late 13th – early 14th century</td><td>stone inscriptions and copperplate charters</td></tr></table>

Hemādri called this family *yādava-vaṁśa*. In their own epigraphic records, the kings of this royal house were named Yādava or described as members of the Yadu dynasty (*yadu-kula*, *yadu-vaṁśa*, or *yadv-anvaya*) and as descendants of one branch of the mythical lunar lineage (*soma-vaṁśa*). The historical Yādavas were not the only dynasty which used the name Yādava.<fnref n="1" /> Before them, the Rāṣṭrakūṭa

<footnote n="1">1 The label “historical Yādavas” is used by modern historians, but was, of course, no concept that was really applicable in their time, because the kings of that dynasty would not have</footnote>
kings had employed this name as a secondary appellation since the reign of Amoghavarṣa I (Schmiedchen 2014, 48–51). The Karnataka-based Hoysaļa rulers, contemporaries of the Yādavas, also tagged their royal dynasty with the same appellation as a secondary designation (Derrett 1957, 15). The historical Yādava kings were also called Seuņa (Sevaņa, Sevuņa), although not so much by themselves but rather by their adversaries, for instance, the Hoysaļas and the Kākatīyas (Verma 1970, 71–72, 86, 103–4). An early ruler of the Yādavas had borne the name Seuņacandra, and the Yādavas used the designation Seuņadeśa for their core area, the present-day Khandesh region (R. G. Bhandarkar 1927, 138; Schmiedchen 2014, 325, 331, 343).

Inscriptional evidence for the activities of the early Yādava line starts after the decline of Rāṣṭrakūṭa power, around the year 1000. The earliest Yādava rulers (850–1000), who were probably subordinates of the Rāṣṭrakūṭas, seem to have left no epigraphs of their own. They are only mentioned in the *praśastis* of their immediate successors (1000–1100), who had to acknowledge the supremacy of the Western Cālukyas of Kalyāņa. The upper Godāvarī area was the heartland of the Yādava polity during the eleventh century. We possess a small number of inscriptions from this period, almost exclusively Sanskrit copper plates.

The late Yādava phase sets in towards the end of the twelfth century. Only stone records are known from the decades until the mid-thirteenth century. Although several copperplate charters have survived from the period of the second half of the thirteenth to the first half of the fourteenth century, stone records outnumber them by far (Schmiedchen 2014, 325–26). The late Yādava rulers extended their rule over large parts of the Deccan, which today belong to Maharashtra and to north and central Karnataka. This expansion towards the south had become possible because of the steady decline of Cālukya power around Kalyāņa at the end of the twelfth century (Table 2).

<table><caption>Table 2. Chronology of the Yādavas and some other important central Indian dynasties</caption><tr><td>Calukyas of Bādāmi</td><td>Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Gujarat</td><td>6th to 8th century</td></tr><tr><td>Rāṣṭrakūṭas</td><td>Maharashtra, Gujarat, and north Karnataka</td><td>8th to 10th century</td></tr><tr><td>Yādavas</td><td>Maharashtra and north Karnataka</td><td>early: 9th to 11th century<br>late: 12th to 14th century</td></tr><tr><td>Cālukyas of Kalyāņa</td><td>Karnataka</td><td>10th to 12th century</td></tr></table>

made a distinction in their self-perception between their mythological ancestors and their historical predecessors. It seems, however, justified to apply this label, because this royal family stands out from others in using this name as a primary appellation.
The link between the early (Table 3) and the late (Figure 1) Yādava branch is not entirely clear. Epigraphs which can be safely attributed to the early Yādavas seem to cease with Āiramadeva (Schmiedchen 2014, 329), whereas inscriptions which can be safely attributed to the late Yādavas start only with Bhillama V (ibid., 338). Hence, Yādava history is obscured between the end of the eleventh and the late twelfth century. From this interim period, we know a few stone records of a more private character, which were either issued by local rulers whose relationship to the Yādavas is a matter of speculation, or refer to the Yādava dynasty in an incidental way without mentioning their pedigree. On the other hand, all the *praśastis* from the late Yādava period, with just one exception, trace back their genealogy at the most up to Yādava Siṅghaṇa I (ibid., 339). Hence, if we had only these inscriptions, we would know virtually nothing about the potential connection between the early and the late Yādava lines.

<table><caption>Table 3. Line of succession and dates of the early Yādavas according to their epigraphs</caption><tr><td>1.</td><td>Dṛḍhaprahāra/Dṛḍhaprahārin</td></tr><tr><td>2.</td><td>Seuṇacandra I</td></tr><tr><td>3.</td><td>Dhāḍi[yappa]</td></tr><tr><td>4.</td><td>Bhillama I</td></tr><tr><td>5.</td><td>Rāja</td></tr><tr><td>6.</td><td>Vandiga/Vaddiga (+ queen Voddiyavvā)</td></tr><tr><td>7.</td><td>Bhillama II (+ queen Lacchiyavvā/Lakṣmī)</td><td>ŚS 922 (1000 CE)</td></tr><tr><td>8.</td><td>Vesū[ka] (+ queen Nāyīyaladevī)</td></tr><tr><td>9.</td><td>Bhillama III (+ queen Avvalladevī)</td><td>ŚS 948 (1025 CE), ŚS 974 (1052 CE)</td></tr><tr><td>10.</td><td>Seuṇacandra/Seuṇendu II</td><td>ŚS 991 (1069 CE)</td></tr><tr><td>11.</td><td>Āira[m]madeva (+ queen Yogallā)</td><td>ŚS 1009 (1087 CE), ŚS 1020 (1098 CE)</td></tr></table>

The decisive epigraphic clue is not provided by a copperplate charter, but by the *Methi stone inscription of Yādava Kṛṣṇa II* (r. 1247–1261), dated ŚS 1176 (1254 CE), which has been engraved on the door lintel above the entrance to the main hall of the Anantaśayana temple in Methi (Dhule District in northwestern Maharashtra). In this epigraph, the dynastic pedigree of the Yādavas is traced back up to Dṛḍhaprahāra (Table 3), the founder of the early line.
<figure><img src="image_33.png" /></figure>

Figure 1. Pedigree of the late Yādavas, reconstructed on the basis of inscriptions and Hemādri. The reason for starting the numbering with 16 is that Hemādri’s pedigree for the early Yādavas has been taken into account here; see Table 4 below.

## 2. Epigraphic versus non-epigraphic *praśastis*

The obscure relationship of the late Yādavas with the early line of the same name is comparable to that between the late Western Cālukyas of Kalyāṇa and the early Calukyas of Bādāmi<fnref n="2" /> (Pollock 2006, 153–61). The gap between the early Calukyas and the late Cālukyas was one of two hundred years, caused by the two centuries of Rāṣṭrakūṭa rule in between. The Calukya/Cālukya and the Yādava traditions have in common that, besides inscriptions, non-epigraphic texts are available for historical reconstruction: the Sāhasabhīmavijayam for the Cālukyas and Hemādri’s *Caturvargacintāmaṇi* for the Yādavas.<fnref n="3" /> Some of the Vratakhaṇḍa manuscripts of the *Caturvargacintāmaṇi* comprise a pedigree of both the lines. We owe this important information to R. G. Bhandarkar (1927, 136), who explained:

<footnote n="2">2 For my distinction in the spelling of the names between “Calukya” (for the Bādāmi line) and “Cālukya” (for the Kalyāṇa line), see Schmiedchen (2014, 7 n. 5). See also Fleet (1882, 17–30, 39–56) and Kielhorn (1902–03, 2, 26).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 For the *Caturvargacintāmaṇi*, see also De Simini (2016, 235, 256, 268, 283).</footnote>
The genealogy of the Yādavas is given in the introduction to the *Vratakhaṇḍa* attributed to or composed by Hemādri, who was a minister of Mahādeva, one of the later princes of the dynasty. Some of the Manuscripts of the work, however, do not contain it, and in others it begins with Bhillama, as it was he who acquired supreme power and raised the dynasty to importance. Others again contain an account of the family from the very beginning, the first person mentioned being the Moon who was churned out of the milky ocean.

As the *Bibliotheca Indica* edition of the *Vratakhaṇḍa* does not contain these *praśastis*, Bhandarkar (1927, 136–37 n. 2) studied the manuscripts and edited the longer version, which consists of more than fifty stanzas, as *Rājapraśasti I*, and the shorter one as *Rājapraśasti II* (ibid., 191–98).<fnref n="4" />

In contrast, the royal genealogy in the *Methi stone inscription of Yādava Kṛṣṇa II, ŚS 1176*, comprises only two stanzas (vv. 4–5), presenting ten members of the early Yādava line and eight members of the late Yādava line up to King Kṛṣṇa II, in a listlike manner. It is worth mentioning that this record merely combines data from early and late epigraphic *praśastis*, without adding any information. Those representatives of the early Yādavas who were left out in the charters, because they belonged to collateral branches, are also missing here, a practice labelled as “collateral oppression” by David Henige (1975). The composition of the *Methi stone inscription* must have been based on similar sources as the early Yādava copper plates, or on copies of such charters. But why can we suppose that some members of the dynasty were omitted in the records? The main reason for this assumption is that Hemādri, who apparently aimed at providing a “complete” pedigree of the royal dynasty he was serving, has listed more family members of the early Yādava line (Table 4) than all the known stone and copperplate inscriptions together (Schmiedchen 2014, 329).

The differences in the early Yādava pedigrees deducible from all the epigraphs on the one hand and from the account in Hemādri’s *Vratakhaṇḍa* on the other pose the question for the reasons behind these obvious genealogical disparities. Had the composers of the early inscriptions attempted to streamline potential disruptions in the actual line of succession through systematic omissions, or did Hemādri, conversely, try to subsequently fill certain gaps in the transmission? As the two source types do not generally contradict each other, it can be assumed that the first option is the more likely one, i.e. that the authors of the epigraphs tried to streamline the official Yādava pedigree. Those who commissioned the inscriptions seem to have instructed the chancelleries to

<footnote n="4">⁴ For these “paratexts,” see also De Simini (2016, 236).</footnote>
make a selection of only the most important Yādava protagonists in terms of dynastic politics and to omit certain others (Schmiedchen 2014, 337).

<table><caption>Table 4. Comparison of the line of succession of the early Yādavas in different sources</caption><thead><tr><th>Copperplate charters,<br>ŚS 922–1020</th><th>Methi stone inscription,<br>ŚS 1176</th><th>Hemādri, Vratakhaṇḍa,<br>ŚS 1182–1192</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1. Dṛḍhaprahārin</td><td>1. Dṛḍhaprahāra (v. 4)</td><td>1. Dṛḍhaprahārin (v. I.20)</td></tr><tr><td>2. Seuṇacandra I</td><td>2. Seunna I (v. 4)</td><td>2. Seuṇacandra I (v. I.22)</td></tr><tr><td>3. Dhāḍiyappa</td><td>3. Dhāḍipaka (v. 4)</td><td>3. Dhāḍiyasa (v. I.23)</td></tr><tr><td>4. Bhillama I</td><td>4. Bhillama I (v. 4)</td><td>4. Bhillama I (v. I.23)</td></tr><tr><td>5. Rāja</td><td>5. Rāja (v. 4)</td><td>5. Rājagi (v. I.23)</td></tr><tr><td>6. Vandiga/Vaddiga</td><td>6. Vādugi (v. 4)</td><td>6. Vādugi I (v. I.23)<br>7. Dhāḍiyama (v. I.24)</td></tr><tr><td>7. Bhillama II</td><td>7. Vara-Bhillama (v. 4)</td><td>8. Bhillama II (v. I.24)</td></tr><tr><td>8. Vesūka</td><td>8. Vesugideva (v. 4)</td><td>9. Vesugi I (v. I.24)</td></tr><tr><td>9. Bhillama III</td><td>9. Mṛga-Bhillama (v. 5)</td><td>10. Bhillama III (v. I.26)<br>11. Vādugi II (v. I.26)<br>12. Vesugi II (v. I.27)<br>13. Bhillama IV (v. I.28)</td></tr><tr><td>10. Seuṇacandra II</td><td>10. Seunna II (v. 5)</td><td>14. Seuṇa II (v. I.28)</td></tr><tr><td>11. Āiramadeva</td><td></td><td>15. Parammadeva (v. I.30)</td></tr></tbody></table>

Since the role of *praśastis* may have differed in epigraphic and non-epigraphic writing, it might be advisable to take a closer look at the authors of these texts. One of the opening stanzas (v. 13) of the *Caturvargacintāmaṇi* identifies Hemādri as the *sarva-śrīkaraṇa-prabhu* or ‘head of all administrative departments’<fnref n="5" /> of King Mahādeva (r. 1261–1271). The colophons of this work use a similar term to denote its author, namely *samasta-karaṇādhīśvara*, ‘supervisor of all administrative departments.’<fnref n="6" /> A minister called Hemādri is also described in the *Thane copper-plate charter of the time of Yādava Rāmacandra* (r. 1272–1311), dated ŚS 1194

<footnote n="5">5 Kane (1930, 356 n. 849). Sircar (1966, 318) gives as first meaning of *śrīkaraṇa*: “the drafting of documents; a scribe or scribe-accountant or secretary,” adding that “the minister Hemādri was styled *Sarva-śrīkaraṇa-prabhu*.” He lists as second meaning: “record office; the record department; the department responsible for drawing up documents,” as third meaning: “record officer; the officer in charge of drawing documents,” as fourth meaning: “the income department.” The *Lekhapaddhati* (2.0, vv. 7–10) itemises 32 departments (*karaṇa*), headed by the *śrīkaraṇa*, which Strauch (2002, 482) translates as “state chancelery; income department.” As Hemādri was the “head of all *śrīkaraṇas*,” the term was perhaps used as a synonym for *karaṇa*.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">6 Cf. Kane (1930, 356 n. 850). The term *śrīkaraṇa* is hardly attested in Yādava inscriptions, but it occurs frequently in epigraphs of the Śilāhāras of North Konkan, dating from the eleventh and twelfth centuries; see Schmiedchen (2014, 238–45, 489–94).</footnote>
(1272 CE). It is highly probable that this high-level official was identical with the famous contemporary author of the *Caturvargacintāmaṇi*:

[Now,] while King Śrī-Rāmacandra, a moon for the water-lily of the Yadu family, is ruling the entire terrestrial globe, and while Śrī-Hemādri, the supervisor of all the elephant-keepers, a crest-jewel among the ministers, a Rohaṇa mountain of gems of virtue, who makes [others] happy with his own virtues [and] who has conquered the province of Jhāḍi, is bearing the burden of the whole kingdom, which he has obtained through his (Rāmacandra's) favour, and executing the supervision of all the departments (*samastakaraṇa*) [...].<fnref n="7" />

In contrast to the information about the author of the *Caturvargacintāmaṇi*, there is only very little known about the officials who drafted the inscriptions. Unlike the charters commissioned by several other dynasties, the copper plates from the Yādava kingdom often do not contain any data about the individuals who composed these title-deeds. Less than half of the extant records engraved on copper plates during the late Yādava period reveal who authored these texts.

The evidence from the thirteenth-century copper plates of the Yādava kingdom suggests that no general template was used for the drafting of the epigraphic *praśasti* of the royal dynasty. However, there is some proof that certain *praśasti* versions were employed more than once (Schmiedchen 2014, 501–5):

1. The *Chikka-Bagevadi copperplate charter* and the *Bendigere copperplate charter*, both of the time of Yādava Kṛṣṇa II and dated ŚS 1171 (1249 CE), have some panegyric verses in common.

2. The *Kalegaon copperplate charter of Yādava Mahādeva*, ŚS 1182 and the *Paithan copperplate charter of Yādava Rāmacandra*, ŚS 1193 have 16 *praśasti* stanzas in common.

3. Ten verses of the Yādava *praśasti* are identical in the two *Thane copperplate charters of the time of Yādava Rāmacandra*, dated ŚS 1194 and 1212.

<footnote n="7">⁷ Thane copperplate charter of the time of Yādava Rāmacandra, ŚS 1194, ll. 38–41: sakala-bhūvalayam anuṣāsati yadu-kula-kumuda-caṁdre śrī-rāmacaṁdra-nareṁdre tathaitat-prasādāvāpta-nikhila-rājya-dhuriṁnatāṁ vahati samasta-hastipakādhyakṣe nija-guṇa-subhagaṁ-bhāvuka-bhāvake samasta-karaṇādhipatyam aṅgīkurvāṇe ca nirjita-jhāḍi-maṁḍale maṁtri-cūḍā-maṇau guṇa-ratna-rohaṇādrau śrī-hemādrau [...]. For the interpretation, see also Kane (1930, 357 n. 851).</footnote>
4. The *Neurgaon stone inscription* and the *Purshottampuri copperplate charter of Yādava Rāmacandra*, dated ŚS 1200 (1278 CE) and 1232 (1310 CE), have seven stanzas of their *praśasti* version in common.<fnref n="8" />

Besides, there are also a few intersections between the otherwise independent versions of examples 2 and 4. One stanza (v. 13) of the *Paithan copperplate charter* describing Siṅghaṇa II makes its reappearance in the *Purshottampuri copperplate charter* (v. 4);<fnref n="9" /> and the first hemistich of another stanza from the Paithan record (v. 21ab) depicting Rāmacandra gets recycled as the second hemistich of a different verse in the Purshottampuri title-deed (v. 13cd).

Example 2 indicates that the *praśasti* of a predecessor (Mahādeva) was sometimes updated for a successor during his early reign (Rāmacandra). But the eulogy could also be substituted by an entirely new version during the later rule of a successor (see example 4).<fnref n="10" />

All the four examples reveal that the officials who drafted the texts of the charters must have repeatedly drawn on a template-like stock of official or semi-official *praśasti* stanzas. But the specific relation between these clerks and the chancellery cannot be derived from the Yādava-period epigraphs. All the relevant inscriptions from that time provide at best the name of such a “scribe,” but no details regarding his particular role or designation.<fnref n="11" />

Hemādri, on the other hand, is explicitly labelled as having been in charge of the administration in the Yādava kingdom during the rule of King Mahādeva (Caturvargacintāmaṇi) and most probably also during the early years of the reign of King Rāmacandra (Thane copperplate charter of the time of Yādava Rāmacandra, ŚS 1194). The portfolio of minister Hemādri’s duties most likely included the responsibility for the royal chancellery at Devagiri, the capital. In this role, he must have had, *inter alia*, access to the administrative records of the dynasty.

<footnote n="8">8 The first of the two slabs of the *Neurgaon stone inscription* begins with the first seven stanzas of the *Purshottampuri copperplate charter*, but the *praśasti* is illegible thereafter. In addition, the *First copper plate of a charter of Yādava Rāmacandra* has also five stanzas in common with the *Neurgaon stone inscription of Yādava Rāmacandra*, and seven stanzas with the *Purshottampuri copperplate charter of Yādava Rāmacandra*. For the details see below.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 This stanza is also attested as verse 4 in the *Neurgaon stone inscription* and in the *First copper plate of a charter of Yādava Rāmacandra*, respectively.</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 For a similar practice under the Rāṣṭrakūtas, see Schmiedchen (2014, 31, 35, 466–78).</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 Schmiedchen (2014, 341, 501–5). For instance, the *Kalegaon copperplate charter of Yādava Mahādeva* and the *Purshottampuri copperplate charter of Yādava Rāmacandra* do not refer to the authors of the epigraphs; the *Paithan copperplate charter of Yādava Rāmacandra* mentions that a certain Paṇḍita Dhaneśvara had drafted the record.</footnote>
However, the Yādava *praśasti* as given in Hemādri’s work seems to have been composed independently from the versions produced in the chancellery for the official epigraphs. Despite the comprehensiveness in listing the (male) members of the Yādava dynasty, the information given by Hemādri is far less detailed, often markedly cursory, compared with the inscriptional data. In terms of content, a further main difference between the two sources is that Hemādri does not mention a single queen, whereas the copperplate charters of the early Yādavas do record matrimonial alliances (Table 3). However, it was not only Hemādri who omitted any reference to such relations, as the epigraphs of the late Yādava period are equally silent about them.<fnref n="12" />

### 3. Eulogies of subordinate rulers under the late Yādavas

The main focus of the later inscriptions is on military conflicts and encounters with rival kings, as well as on interaction with subordinate rulers (Schmiedchen 2014, 337, 341). In comparison to the early Yādava kings, a typical feature of the epigraphic attestations from the late period of Yādava rule was a rather great diversity in hierarchical relations and a ramified system of vassal and sub-vassal contacts, with several Brāhmaṇas having obtained the status of military leaders. A clear indication for the strong impact of vassals<fnref n="13" /> from the eleventh century onwards is the fact that the number of known copper plates issued by subordinates of the Yādavas was three times higher than the number of those commissioned by Yādava kings. Besides, the inscriptions of vassals provide more information on late Yādava history than the records of the Yādava rulers. Whereas all the seven extant copperplate charters of the early Yādava period were issued by kings of that dynasty (Schmiedchen 2014, 498–500), only three of the twelve completely preserved charters of the later period were commissioned by Yādava rulers (Schmiedchen 2014, 500–505), namely the *Kalegaon copperplate*

<footnote n="12">12 There seems to exist at least one exception to this general tendency. The *First copper plate of a charter of Yādava Rāmacandra*, v. 7ab, introduces King Rāmacandra as the son of Kṛṣṇa II and Lakṣmī: *jayati jagati rāmaḥ kāma evāvatīrṇṇaḥ punar api yadu-vaṁśe kṛṣṇa-lakṣmī-tanūjaḥ*.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 Due to a lack of better alternatives, I am using here the terms “subordinate” and “vassal” interchangeably for all those rulers who seem to have acknowledged the suzerainty or sovereignty of any of the Yādava kings, although I am aware of the fact that the concept of vassalage has been borrowed from descriptions of medieval European history and might be almost as problematic as the terms related to “feudal” and “feudatory.”</footnote>
charter of Yādava Mahādeva, ŚS 1182, the Paithan copperplate charter of Yādava Rāmacandra, ŚS 1193, and the Purshottampuri copperplate charter of Yādava Rāmacandra, ŚS 1232.<fnref n="14" /> So far, we do not know of any copperplate charters issued by the kings Siṅghaṇa II or Kṛṣṇa II themselves. On the other hand, some of the stone epigraphs can be directly attributed to Yādava rulers, for instance, the Methi stone inscription of Yādava Kṛṣṇa II, ŚS 1176, and the Neurgaon stone inscription of Yādava Rāmacandra, ŚS 1200. Accordingly, not only is our knowledge about the late Yādava kings to a great part derived from the inscriptions of their subordinates, but we also have much more information about these vassals than about the Yādava kings.

There is another noteworthy point to be added: as already mentioned, ancestry from the maternal side is not pointed out for the late Yādavas either in their own inscriptions or in the records of their subordinates, nor even in the account of Hemādri. However, this does not mean that references to maternal ancestry are completely absent from the epigraphic material of that region and period. The inscriptions commissioned by vassals of the Yādavas show that the paternal ancestry as well as maternal parentage are mirrored in epigraphic genealogies of some subordinates of Brahmanical descent. For Kholeśvara, a subordinate of Yādava Siṅghaṇa II (Schmiedchen 2014, 338, 364–69), not only is his mother Candrā explicitly mentioned, but so are his mythical forefathers (Mudgala and Kaśyapa) as well as the last three male ancestors on both the paternal and the maternal side. The paternal line of Kholeśvara consisted of Brāhmaṇas famous for their expertise in traditional Vedic learning/teaching. Kholeśvara’s father, the Brāhmaṇa Trivikrama, had been born in a Brahmanical settlement (agrahāra) named Umbarapaṇktikā:

> From him (Svāmideva) descended the famous Trivikrama, a pure incarnation of [religious] merit, an excellent Brāhmaṇa. Through his birth, the entire Brahmanical settlement with the name Umbarapaṇktikā became flawless.<fnref n="15" />

In contrast, his mother’s family, though also of Brahmanical origin, was strongly associated with temporal power (Schmiedchen 2014, 365).

<footnote n="14">14 The Purshottampuri copperplate charter, however, was rather jointly commissioned by Yādava Rāmacandra and his subordinate Puruṣaināyaka alias Puruṣottama (Schmiedchen 2014, 505). So far, this is the last known dated and complete endowment record of the Yādava period. But see also the *First copper plate of a charter of Yādava Rāmacandra*.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 *Sakaleśvara temple inscription of Kholeśvara, v. 7: tataḥ prasiddho 'mala-puṇya-mūrttis trivikramo 'jāyata vipra-varyaḥ| yad-udbhavād umbarapaṇktikāhvah sarvo 'grahāro vimalo babhūva||*.</footnote>
For Puruṣaināyaka alias Puruṣottama, vassal of Rāmacandra and co-donor of the *Purshottampuri copperplate charter*, the last four male forebears of the pater-nal line as well as the last two on the maternal side were enumerated (Schmiedchen 2014, 385).

The subordinates of the Yādavas did not always explicitly label their over-lords through a direct reference to their dynasty, but rather through enumer-ating the individual rulers in their line of succession (Schmiedchen 2014, 325). The subordinates often expressed their loyalty towards the sovereigns, fre-quently modelling their genealogies and epithets on the panegyrics of their overlords.

Siṅghaṇa II (r. 1200–1247) was the longest-reigning and the most successful Yādava king. Under his rule, large parts of Maharashtra and north Karnataka were integrated into the empire, and even for the core area around Devagiri, there is evidence of a well-developed network of vassalage. King Siṅghaṇa II was able to stabilise the kingdom through the efficient inclusion of different layers of subordinate rulers and by balancing their diverse interests.

One of Siṅghaṇa II's vassals was the aforementioned Kholeśvara, who is known from four stone epigraphs which have been found in and around Ambajogai (Bid District in central Maharashtra): the *Sakaleśvara temple inscription of Kholeśvara*, ŚS 1150, the *Ambajogai fragmentary inscription of Kholeśvara*, the *Yogeśvarī temple inscription of Kholeśvara*, and the *Rāmanārāyaṇa temple inscription of Lakṣmī*, ŚS 1162. These records are composed in Sanskrit, but also contain passages in Marathi. Only two of the four epigraphs are dated: ŚS 1150 (1228/29 CE) and ŚS 1162 (1240 CE). Kholeśvara served as military leader under Siṅghaṇa II in the north of the Yādava kingdom. Some military achievements were simultaneously attributed to him as well as to his overlord. Two identical stanzas in three of the epigraphs contain a comprehensive list of victories assigned to Siṅghaṇa II:

> The flawless king Śrī-Siṅghaṇa [II], a fire of mighty prowess, is one who has defeated the troops of all [his] enemies, [and] whose fame [shines] white [like] jasmine on the horizon. He took, in a moment, the whole powerful, prospering kingdom of Arjuna, which was full of horses and elephants, [and also] destroyed [the city of] Dhārā, an ornament of the earth. He killed the Teluṅga, and smashed the extremely strong Gūrjara. Keśi ('the hairy one') pulled out his hair [out of desperation]. The Hosala (Hoysaṇa), with his people, was chased to the water of a puddle, the Coḍa (Cōḍa) to the "breast" of
the sea. The man-killing Subhaṭa was driven to death in battle. The Gauḍa was thrown out of the game, and the Turuṣka was rapidly made run away.<fnref n="16" />

Arjuna must have been the Paramāra ruler of Mālava, as his residence Dhārā is mentioned; and Subhaṭa may be identified as Subhaṭavarman, Arjuna’s father. Conflicts between the Yādavas and the Caulukyas of Gujarat, in epigraphs often called Gūrjara, are not only described in contemporary inscriptions: the Gujarat chronicles also record these events, e.g. the Kīrtikaumudī of Someśvara (4.42–53). The Lekhapaddhati (2.44), on the other hand, contains a template for a kind of non-aggression-and-mutual-assistance pact (yamala-patra) dated VS 1288 (1231 CE), in which the two parties of the notional agreement are a mahā-rājādhirāja Siṁhaṇadeva and a mahāmaṇḍaleśvara Lāvaṇyaprasāda, to be identified with Yādava Siṅghaṇa II and the contemporary Vāghelā ruler Lāvaṇyaprasāda. The Teluṅga against whom Siṅghaṇa II had to fight was probably the Kākatīya ruler Gaṇapatideva (r. 1199–1262). The identity of King Keśi is not clear, but Ajay Mitra Shastri (1972, 13) opined that he might have been Jayakeśin II, a Kādamba ruler of Goa. The contemporary Hoysaṇa adversaries were Ballāḍa II (r. 1173–1220) and Narasiṁha II (r. 1220–1238). Siṅghaṇa II’s opponents on the Cōlā side may have been the kings Kulottuṅga III, Rājarāja III, and Rājendra III, but there is no external evidence that the Yādava ruler was ever able to defeat his Cōlā rivals. The military success against the Gauḍa or Bengal king is not attested otherwise, and the Turuṣka was probably a contemporary Muslim ruler or military leader.<fnref n="17" /> This Turuṣka may have been the same as the “hero”

<footnote n="16">16 The Sakaleśvara temple inscription of Kholeśvara, vv. 2–3: asti dhvasta-samasta-vairi-nikaraḥ prauḍha-pratāpānalaḥ kuṁda-śveta-digaṁta-kīrttir amalaḥ śrī-siṁghaṇaḥ kṣoṇipah| yenāhāri hariṇha-saṁbhytaṁ atisphītaṁ samastaṁ kṣaṇād rājyaṁ prājyam athārjjunasya dalitā dhārā dharā-bhūṣaṇaṁ|| teluṅgo yena nīto nidhanam atibalo gūrjjaro jarjaratvaṁ keśiḥ keśāpanodaṁ parijana-sahito hosalaḥ palvalāṁbhah| coḍaḥ kroḍaṁ payodhe raṇa-bhuvi subhaṭo mṛtyu-kālaṁ nṛkālo gauḍaḥ krīḍā-nirastaḥ kṛta iha sahasā prāpta-dikkas turuṣkah||. See also vv. 2–3 in the Ambajogai fragmentary inscription of Kholeśvara and in the Yogeśvarī temple inscription of Kholeśvara, as well as Schmiedchen (2014, 367 Table 17).</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 Chattopadhyaya (1998, 30): “Another instance of an ethnic term changing into a generic term in the early medieval period is Turuṣka; its use was too frequent to have been restricted to a single ethnic connotation alone.” For the use of this term in different regions/periods, see Sanderson (2009, 112); Chojnacki (2011, 205–10); Rao (2016, 71–76); Slaje (2019, 141–46).</footnote>
Hammīra<fnref n="18" /> mentioned in the *Patne stone inscription of the time of Yādava Siṅghaṇa II, ŚS 1128* (v. 7).<fnref n="19" />

In his *Sakaleśvara temple inscription, ŚS 1150*, Kholeśvara is labelled a military leader (*sainyādhipati*) and prince (*kṣmāpati*),<fnref n="20" /> and is compared to the sages Viśvāmitra and Agastya<fnref n="21" /> as well as to Indra.<fnref n="22" /> Kholeśvara is credited with a number of military successes, which have been also attributed to his overlord, Yādava Siṅghaṇa II, in the epigraphs from Ambajogai. This fact, of course, stresses the importance which their vassals had for the Yādavas in military encounters. The *Sakaleśvara temple inscription* records victories of Kholeśvara against the already known enemies of Siṅghaṇa II: the Gūrjaras (i.e. the Caulukyas), Paramāras of Dhārā, Cōlas, Hoysalas, and Teluṅgas (i.e. the Kākatīyas), as well as Mahāhammīra. In addition, the list of ostensible foes of Kholeśvara also includes the Raṭṭas, the kings of Vaṅga (i.e. the Senas), of Kosala (i.e. the Kalacuris), and of Kaliṅga (i.e. the Eastern Gaṅgas), as well as the Nepālikas.<fnref n="23" /> It is rather striking that the list of military achievements attributed to the subordinate Kholeśvara comprises triumphs over many more adversaries than that for his overlord Siṅghaṇa II. The reliability of this account with regard to anything other than the battles against the Gujarat kings, the Paramāras, and Hammīra is questionable.

The last of the four Ambajogai inscriptions, the *Rāmanārāyaṇa temple inscription of Lakṣmī*, was issued by Kholeśvara's daughter, who ruled on behalf of the (minor) son of her deceased brother Rāma, her father's successor. Lakṣmī's epigraph contains a new *praśasti* composition, in which, unlike the inscriptions of her father, any reference to maternal ancestry is missing, and not even her mother's name is mentioned. But in stanza 4, her father's Maudgala lineage is described as "shining through a multitude of gifted male and female jewels"

<footnote n="18">18 For the term *hammīra* derived from Arabic ʿamīr, see Sircar (1965, 341). It is not clear who this Hammīra of the first half of the 13th century was. One of the first Muslim rulers denoted as Hammīra was Maḥmūd of Ghaznī (b. 971; d. 1030); see Slaje (2019, 141 n. 76). For the term *hammīra-vīra* being used for the Muslim adversaries of the Gāhaḍavāla king Govindacandra (r. 1109–1168), see De Simini (2016, 241).</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 See also Schmiedchen (2014, 346).</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 *Sakaleśvara temple inscription, v. 4.* The same stanza occurs in the *Ambajogai fragmentary inscription* and the *Yogeśvarī temple inscription*.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">21 *Sakaleśvara temple inscription, v. 8.* The same stanza occurs as v. 23 in the *Yogeśvarī temple inscription*.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">22 *Sakaleśvara temple inscription, v. 15.*</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23 *Sakaleśvara temple inscription, v. 16* and prose in ll. 27–32. The same stanza occurs as v. 25 in the *Yogeśvarī temple inscription*.</footnote>
(maudgalānāṁ sa vaṁśo viśada-puruṣa-yoṣid-ratna-puṁja-prakāśaḥ), and Kholeś-
vara is described as kingmaker in a very self-confident way:

[Kholeśvara] himself, this ‘Club of Śrī-Yama,’ this unique preceptor for [the granting of] shelter and protection, this teacher for the rules of proficiency in installing kings, this ‘Forest Fire’ for the woods which were his enemies, rendered Śrī-Simha (Siṅghaṇa II) a carefree ruler. Who else on earth was like him?<sup>24</sup>

Kholeśvara's son Rāma, like his father a military leader (sainyādhipati), is said to have fought against the Caulukyas alias Gūrjaras, losing his life in these battles. The eulogies of her father and brother are followed by Lakṣmī's own panegyric, including a description of the religious grant which she made in Rāma's honour.

4. Post-Hemādri panegyrics

As already discussed above, the *Methi stone inscription of Yādava Kṛṣṇa II* and some manuscripts of the *Vratakhaṇḍa* of the *Caturvargacintāmaṇi* provide evidence for reconstructing the link between the early and the late Yādava lineages. But their transmission of the dynastic pedigree ends with Kṛṣṇa II and Mahādeva. The composition of the *Caturvargacintāmaṇi* was probably completed during the reign of Mahādeva, as no successor of this king is mentioned in the text. Hence, for the last decades of Yādava history, we again depend on inscriptions. Some additional information is provided by the emerging Marathi literature of the Mahānubhāvas, as well as by Arabic sources on the rule of ʿAlā al-Dīn **Khaljī** (r. 1296–1316),<sup>25</sup> who finally subjugated the Yādavas of Devagiri.

Rāmacandra was the nephew of Mahādeva, but not his direct successor. Mahādeva's son Āmaṇa seems to have ascended the throne after his father's demise. No inscriptions attributed to Āmaṇa's reign are known so far, and not all later Yādava epigraphs mention him (Schmiedchen 2014, 339). The throne appears to have been quickly usurped by Rāmacandra, Āmaṇa's cousin. These events of contested collateral succession are reflected in the various *praśastis* in different ways. The *Paithan copperplate charter of Yādava Rāmacandra, ŚS 1193*, the earliest preserved record of this king, contains a genealogy following the model

<footnote n="24">24 Rāmanārāyaṇa temple inscription of Lakṣmī, v. 9: eṣa śrī-yama-daṁḍa eṣa śaraṇa-trāṇaika-dīkṣā-
gurū rāja-sthāpana-kārya-kauśala-vidhāv ācārya eṣa svayaṁ| eṣa dveṣi-vaneṣu dāva-dahanaḥ
śrī-simham eṣa prabhuṁ niściṁtaṁ vyadadhād amuṣya sadṛśaḥ ko 'nyo 'bhavad bhū-tale||.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">25 Altekar (1960, 546–55); Joshi (1966); Lal (1967); Verma (1970, 151–52); Mahalingam (1992, 151–55).</footnote>
already attested in the *Kalegaon copperplate charter of Mahādeva*, Rāmacandra's
uncle. Stanza 23 of the latter presents Kṛṣṇa II's successor as his younger brother
(tasyānujah), and verse 24 refers to this king by his name Mahādeva. The *Paithan*
*copperplate charter*, however, only contains the first of these two stanzas (as
v. 19), and, hence, the younger brother of Kṛṣṇa II is not mentioned by name
here. In this record of Rāmacandra, the Yādava pedigree is updated through the
introduction of Āmaṇa as son of Kṛṣṇa II's younger brother in stanza 20; and the
next verse describes the transfer of power from Āmaṇa to Rāmacandra:

From him (Āmaṇa), this Rāma[candra], son of Kṛṣṇa, has forcefully taken
away his territory [and] enjoys [it now]. His sword makes the directions fra-
grant through deeds which are like blossoming lotuses.<fnref n="26" />

The *Purshottampuri copperplate charter of Yādava Rāmacandra* also presents the succession in the same sequence (Kṛṣṇa II – his younger brother Mahādeva – his son Āmaṇa [here Āṃmaṇa]<fnref n="27" /> – Kṛṣṇa II’s son Rāmacandra), though in a different textual composition. The first hemistich of the stanza describing the conflict just quoted from the *Paithan copperplate charter* has been reused here:

> Having ascended the most formidable Devagiri over ladders [made] of the
> heads of enemy kings, this Rāma[candra], son of Kṛṣṇa, has forcefully taken
> away from him (Āmaṇa) his territory [and] enjoys [it now].<fnref n="28" />

The next stanza describes the tactic of recapturing the capital Devagiri in detail:

> First intrusion into Devagiri, then observation of the manner of dancing, af-
> terwards assembling of voluntary foot-soldiers, then throwing off of orna-
> ments, removal of the opponent for the aspired aim, and appropriation of

<footnote n="26">26 Paithan copperplate charter, v. 21: prasahya tasmād apahṛtya bhuṁkte kṛṣṇātmajah svām avaniṁ sa rāmah| yasyāsir ujjṛmbhita-kairavābhair diśo yaśobhiḥ surabhīkaroti||. For detailed reports on these events, see Schmiedchen (2014, 353–54).</footnote>

<footnote n="27">27 His description is positive, expressing that Āmaṇa exempted Brāhmaṇas from paying taxes: “[Then] was born his mighty son, King Āṃmaṇa, who very much supported Brāhmaṇas being plagued by taxes – [as] {the Spearman (Skanda) freed the gods who had been afflicted} by [the demon] Tāraka.” *Purshottampuri copperplate charter*, v. 11: jajñe śaktidharas tasya sūnur āṃmaṇa-bhūpatiḥ| bhū-devān uddharaṁn uccaiḥ kara-tāraka-pīditān||.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">28 *Purshottampuri copperplate charter*, v. 13: āruhya vairi-kṣitipāla-mauli-niśreṇibhir devagiriṁ gariṣṭham| prasahya tasmād apahṛtya bhuṁkte kṛṣṇātmajah svām avaniṁ sa rāmah||.</footnote>
the earth from him – that was done successively by Śrī-Rāma[candra]. Hence, his fame is extraordinary.<fnref n="29" />

Some Mahānubhāva texts in Marathi also address the details of the encounter between Rāmacandra and Āmaṇa. The *Līlācaritra*, said to have been composed in 1278,<fnref n="30" /> gives a vivid account of the confusion caused by the sudden attack of Rāmacandra and his supporters.<fnref n="31" />

The *First copper plate of a charter of Yādava Rāmacandra* provides some additional evidence of the official depiction of this conflict. Due to its incomplete state of preservation, the date of the inscription is not known. Because of the content of the preserved portion of the *praśasti*, it can be assumed that this stray plate must have once belonged to a charter issued after ŚS 1193, the date of the *Paithan copperplate charter*, which is still based on an older version of the eulogy. The *First copper plate* contains twelve panegyric stanzas to praise the Yādava dynasty, but only seven of these are also attested in the *Purshottampuri copper-plate charter*, namely its verses 1–5 and 8–9, whereas its verses 6–7 and 10–12 are different. The omissions and substitutions of individual stanzas are revealing with regard to the Yādava succession quarrels, which are narrated in a modified way here.<fnref n="32" /> Mahādeva and Āmaṇa are omitted in the description of the line of succession. Stanza 6 of the *First copper plate* mentions Kṛṣṇa II, and verse 7 moves on straightaway to King Rāmacandra, describing him as son of Kṛṣṇa and Lakṣmī. As stanza 8 follows the verse already known from the *Purshottampuri copperplate charter*, graphically narrating the recapture of Devagiri through the

<footnote n="29">29 *Purshottampuri copperplate charter*, v. 14: ādau devagiri-praveśanam atho nṛtta-prakāreksaṇaṁ paścāt svaira-padāti-melanam athālaṁkāra-viṣepaṇaṁ| anviṣṭārtha-virodhi-dūra-karaṇaṁ tasmād rasāsādanaṁ śrī-rāmeṇa kṛtaṁ tatas tata itaḥ śloko 'sya lokottaraḥ||. See also Mirashi's (1939–40, 205) comment: "The [...] verse gives an interesting description of the ruse which Rāmacandra adopted to obtain possession of the impregnable fort. He entered it with a party of dancers who were his soldiers in disguise. When admitted inside, he rallied his foot-soldiers and attacked his antagonists apparently while they were engaged in seeing the dance. The dancers also, throwing off their ornaments (i.e. disguise), joined in the fight. [...]"</footnote>

<footnote n="30">30 Gupte (1926, 198–99); Novetzke (2020, 123–31).</footnote>

<footnote n="31">31 Gupte (1926, 198–99); Novetzke (2020, 129). For other versions from Mahānubhāva works, see Verma (1970, 137–38). Āmaṇa is said to have been blinded or even killed.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">32 Stanzas 1–5 of the *First copper plate*, narrating the eulogy up to Jaitrapāla II, the father of Kṛṣṇa II, are identical with vv. 1–5 of the *Purshottampuri copperplate charter*. Stanzas 8–7 are different verses for the description of the succession up to Rāmacandra. Stanzas 8–9 for Rāmacandra are identical with vv. 14–15 of the *Purshottampuri copperplate charter*; stanzas 10–12 are new verses for him.</footnote>
trick just quoted above, but without any reference to the identity of Rāmacandra's adversary so far. Then and only indirectly, in a mythological pun related to the ruler's further description, is the conflict with his rival recorded, still without mentioning his name:

> After having vanquished Mahādeva's capable son, Rāma[candra] acquired [his own] father's royal power and subjugated the supporter of Arjuna, [just as] {Rāma, having broken Mahādeva's favourite bow, obtained Janaka's daughter (Sītā) and defeated the one who had destroyed [Kārtavīrya] Arjuna's fame (Paraśurāma)}.<fnref n="33" />

The reasons for this modification in the *praśasti* can be only speculated about, and they are even more in the dark, as the date of the stray plate is unknown. One might be inclined to assume chronological explanations, i.e. that Mahādeva and Āmaṇa were erased from the officially recorded sequence of succession in the course of time, and, hence, the amendment should be expected to be later than the eulogy in the *Purshottampuri copperplate charter*. But this interpretation is rather unlikely, because the latter inscription itself was issued relatively late, namely in ŚS 1232 (1310 CE), and Rāmacandra's rule is believed to have already ended in or around 1311.<fnref n="34" />

Geographical explanations for the differences in the *praśastis* do not seem to be plausible either, as all the relevant charters were found in central Maharashtra, in an area covered by the present districts of Ahmadnagar, Aurangabad, and Bid, to the south of Devagiri, the Yādava capital. The original provenience of the *First copper plate of a charter of Yādava Rāmacandra* is not known, but it was discovered in Aurangabad in the 1950s. For the time being, we can only conclude that different versions of Rāmacandra's self-representation must have been floating, differing in the degree to which the collaterals Mahādeva and Āmaṇa were made visible in the genealogy.

Two semi-official epigraphic records of the time of Rāmacandra, the *Thane copperplate charters, ŚS 1194 and 1212*, belong to a different region, namely to western Maharashtra, about 300 km to the west of Devagiri. They were issued by two subordinates of Rāmacandra, reigning over the Konkan coast. The Yādava genealogy in these two inscriptions (see example 3 above, p. 193) mentions King

<footnote n="33">33 First copper plate of a charter of Yādava Rāmacandra, v. 10: rāmena kārmukaṁ bhaṁktvā mahādevasya naṁdanaṁ| prāptā janakajā lakṣmīr nirjito 'rjuna-kīrtidah||. The Arjuna mentioned here must be a different Arjuna from the one referred to as an adversary of Siṅghaṇa II.</footnote>

<footnote n="34">34 For the so far latest extant inscription referring to Rāmacandra, probably dated ŚS 1233, see Bhoir (2002).</footnote>
Mahādeva as successor of Kṛṣṇa II, but omits his son Āmaṇa. It can be surmised
that the main reason for this deviation is the fact that this was the version circ-
culated among local rulers of the Konkan region.

5. Conclusion

Royal copperplate charters are the main medium available to us for the study of the official self-representation of the early Yādavas. For the genealogical descriptions of the late Yādavas, we possess copperplate and stone inscriptions issued by the rulers of that line as well as epigraphs commissioned by their vassals. The latter stand for the presentation of others from the viewpoint of subordinates who portray their suzerains. Due to the specific relationship of dependence, these inscriptions do not contradict the contemporary official praśasti versions. They rather provide a larger picture, which includes the self-representation of the vassals, emphasising and sometimes exaggerating their own role for the success and stability of the reign of their overlords, whose names and pedigree they mention, but without any reference to the Yādava descent of these rulers.

Almost all the epigraphs of the late Yādava period are silent about the early
Yādava kings, with only one exception known so far: the *Methi stone inscription
of Yādava Kṛṣṇa II, ŚS 1176.* Besides, some manuscripts of the *Vratakhanḍa* of the
*Caturvargacintāmaṇi* by Hemādri also comprise a pedigree of both the lines, de-
picting them, in fact, as one consecutive lineage. Although Hemādri served as a
minister under the Yādava kings Mahādeva and Rāmacandra, his versions of the
dynasty's genealogy can be also regarded as presentation of others, because he
does not seem to have composed his Yādava *praśasti* on behalf of the ruling dyn-
asty, but rather independently. Although his description does not directly con-
tradict the contemporary official genealogy, it lists several members of the dyn-
asty absent from the epigraphic records.

Whereas the mentioning of queens was part of the official self-representa-
tion in the early Yādava period, these references are omitted in inscriptions
from the late Yādava rule. Hemādri does not mention any royal ladies either,
neither for the early nor for the late Yādava times. However, references to ma-
ternal ancestry were included in the epigraphic self-representation of some of
the subordinates of Brahmanical descent.

Finally, the inscriptions from the late Yādava period indicate some changes
and modifications in the official self-representation of the rulers, especially in
cases of contested collateral succession and resulting collateral oppression.
Primary sources

See page xvi about references to primary sources.

Ambajogai fragmentary inscription of Kholeśvara: Shastri (1972, 3-4).

Bendigere copperplate charter of the time of Yādava Kṛṣṇa II, ŚS 1171: Pathak (1885).

Chikka-Bagevadi copperplate charter of the time of Yādava Kṛṣṇa II, ŚS 1171: Fleet (1878).

First copper plate of a charter of Yādava Rāmacandra: Mirashi (1959).

Kalegaon copperplate charter of Yādava Mahādeva, ŚS 1182: Koparkar (1957-58).

Kīrtikaumudī of Someśvara: Sūri (1961, 3-42).

Methi stone inscription of Yādava Kṛṣṇa II, ŚS 1176: Desai (1949-50).

Neurgaon stone inscription of Yādava Rāmacandra, ŚS 1200: Dikshit (1947, 89-102).

Paithan copperplate charter of Yādava Rāmacandra, ŚS 1193: Fleet (1885).

Patne stone inscription of the time of Yādava Siṅghaṇa II, ŚS 1128: Kielhorn (1892b).

Purshottampuri copperplate charter of Yādava Rāmacandra, ŚS 1232: Mirashi (1939-40).

Rāmanārāyaṇa temple inscription of Lakṣmi, ŚS 1162: Shastri (1972, 49-62).

Sakaleśvara temple inscription of Kholeśvara, ŚS 1150: Shastri (1972, 5-36).

Thane copperplate charter of the time of Yādava Rāmacandra, ŚS 1194: Barnett (1915-16).

Thane copperplate charter of the time of Yādava Rāmacandra, ŚS 1212: Wathen (1839, № 9).

Yogeśvarī temple inscription of Kholeśvara: Shastri (1972, 37-48).
DOI: 10.13173/9783447122306.187

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# On the Bilingual Inscriptions of the Fārūqī Sultans of Khandesh

Luther Obrock<fnref n="1" />

University of California, Berkeley

## 1. Introduction

In the 1580s, the Fārūqī Sultan ʿĀdil Shāh IV (also known as ʿĀdil Khān IV) undertook a noteworthy architectural and epigraphic campaign. In 1584 and 1590, ʿĀdil Shāh dedicated two mosques, one in the hill fort of Asirgarh and one in the city of Burhanpur, both located in the south of the present-day state of Madhya Pradesh. Asirgarh and Burhanpur were two important sites for the Fārūqīs, the ruling family of the small but relatively long-lived Sultanate of Khandesh. ʿĀdil Shāh Fārūqī dedicates these mosques with bilingual Arabic-Sanskrit inscriptions placed in the *mihrāb* in both Asirgarh and Burhanpur. Each inscription is rather brief: the *Asirgarh mosque inscription of ʿĀdil Shāh IV*, the shorter of the two, has two lines of Arabic over three lines of Sanskrit, while the longer *Burhanpur mosque inscription of ʿĀdil Shāh IV* consists of three lines of Arabic over six in Sanskrit. The Arabic text, written in *Naskh*, contains a benediction, Qurʿānic quotations, a cursory genealogy of the Fārūqī Sultans, and a date. In a mixture of verse and prose, the six lines of Sanskrit contain a praise of God, called the *ṣrṣṭi-kartṛ*, the ‘agent of creation,’ a lineage of ʿĀdil Shāh, and a date for the construction of the mosque. In both inscriptions, the Arabic and the Sanskrit text are parallel in structure, however the Sanskrit is far more fulsome in its praise of the Islamic God and its genealogy of ʿĀdil Shāh and much more detailed in its dating; the Sanskrit also provides the year, calculated in two reckoning systems, and exact astrological moment.

While bilingual inscriptions are not rare in South Asian epigraphical history, these tend to use Sanskrit and a regional vernacular such as Kannada or Tamil.

<footnote n="1">1 I would like to thank Pushkar Sohoni for first drawing my attention to the Sanskrit inscriptions in the Burhanpur Mosque and the Asirgarh Fort, and for the many illuminating conversations I have had with him on related topics.</footnote>
The transregional elite languages of Muslim religion, literature, and trade appear next to Sanskrit in a smaller yet significant body of bilingual inscriptions. These bilingual inscriptions combining Arabic or Persian with Sanskrit tend to be either epitaphs or commemorations of pious donations of more "secular" spaces, for instance gardens and wells. To my knowledge, these Fārūqī bilingual inscriptions are unique given their placement within the *mihrāb*, the site of religious focus in the mosque. The bilingual Sanskrit-Arabic inscriptions of ‘Ādil Shāh Fārūqī are doubly marked both by the tension between two languages of religion and power and by their architectural context in a site of Muslim worship. However, the visual and material presence of the bilingual inscriptions at such a prominent place suggests that each of these languages were doing work recognised as the legitimate sphere of each language, and that this work was legible in the juxtaposition of the two languages embodied in the two scripts.

In this brief essay, I introduce and contextualise ‘Ādil Shāh Fārūqī and his epigraphical project to examine the continuing prestige and the new elasticity of Sanskrit epigraphical culture in the Sultanates. While the history of representations of Islamic power in Sanskrit in South Asia stretches back as far as the presence of Islam in the Subcontinent, Sanskrit has tended to be portrayed as completely indifferent to Islamic religion, Islamicate cultural practices, and Muslim people in general. Yet its use in this highly visible religious context shows that various actors continued to valorise the language and that it retained powerful expressive possibilities even in Islamic spaces and sultanate<fnref n="2" /> politics. While the Fārūqīs are marginal within the history of pre-Mughal sultanate polities and while bilingual inscriptions using Islamic languages of prestige are marginal in the history of Sanskrit epigraphy, ‘Ādil Shāh Fārūqī’s mosque inscriptions can serve as instructive examples for the diverse and often surprising habitations of Sanskrit in the sultanate period.

The question thus arises: why was Sanskrit, a language deeply connected to the religious texts and practices of Hinduism, used to consecrate an Islamic place of worship? This basic question, which can help destabilise and recontextualise a priori assumptions about historical periodisation and cultural divisions, leads to further, perhaps more salient questions about this particular use of Sanskrit in a charged religious and political setting. What is the relationship

<footnote n="2">2 Here and throughout I use the adjective “sultanate” with a lower-case “s” as a shorthand for a historical moment between the stabilisation of the first Islamic polities and the rise of the Mughal imperium. In such a way the sultanate period, or the period of the plural sultanates, is taken as a time without clear centralised political or cultural power, in which different regional polities are negotiating their own power, prestige, and representation.</footnote>
between the Arabic and the Sanskrit portions of the inscription? How are the
languages presented in stone? How does the inscription relate to architecture?
How does it speak to elite political and religious practice? Finally, how does this
single (and perhaps singular) use of Sanskrit enrich and complicate both the
history of Sanskrit and the history of elite Hindu-Muslim interactions in the sul-
tanate period?

At the outset it must be stressed that the bilingual inscriptions of ʿĀdil Shāh
IV belong to a completely Islamic context. Unlike in the well-known Veraval
Sanskrit-Arabic bilingual inscription, there is no invocation of Hindu religious
or political agents.<fnref n="3" /> While the Veraval inscription seems to speak to different
political, social, and religious communities in different languages, the Fārūqī in-
scriptions are present an integrated vision of the Fārūqīs, their temporal power,
and their pious largesse. The inscriptions themselves appear on the mīhrāb, the
focus of Islamic worship in the mosque. These inscriptions do not mark sites of
encounter or a liminal space of cross-cultural exchange. The interplay between
Sanskrit and Arabic must then point to some other salient feature of language
and self-presentation in sultanate South Asia. As an experiment toward think-
ing through the tensions and possibilities of bilingual inscriptions in the sultan-
ate period, this paper reads the Sanskrit-Arabic mosque inscriptions of the
Fārūqī Sultans and asks what work does such an inscription do that an inscrip-
tion entirely in Sanskrit or Arabic could not. In the words of Sheldon Pollock
(2006, 502), language deployment represents “choices of cultural-political ac-
tors in response to differential cultural-political circumstances.” While this in-
troductory essay cannot hope to present a new “theory” of Sanskrit in the sul-
tanate world, a careful reading of the bilingual inscriptions of ʿĀdil Shāh IV pro-
vides some insight into the “life” of Sanskrit in relation to emergent languages,
religions, and polities in the complex ecology of elite culture in sultanate South
Asia.

2. The Fārūqī Sultanate

Before looking at ʿĀdil Shāh Fārūqī’s inscriptions, the history of the Fārūqīs and the Khandesh Sultanate must be rehearsed. The Fārūqīs (Table 1) are a somewhat obscure upstart group that managed to take control of Khandesh, an area on the border of present-day southern Madhya Pradesh and northern Maharashtra. Hemmed in by larger and more powerful neighbours — most notably

<footnote n="3">3 For the Veraval inscription, see Patel (2008).</footnote>
the Gujarat and the Ahmadnagar Sultanates — the Fārūqīs managed to survive, even flourish, from their sultanate’s inception in the late fourteenth century until their eventual defeat and annexation by the Mughals in 1610. While much further research remains to be done on the Fārūqīs in Persian language accounts, a basic sketch of their history has been recounted in both Muḥammad Qāsim Firishta’s *Tārikh* and Abū’l-Faẓl’s *Aʾīn-i Akbarī. The Fārūqī Sultans began as an upwardly mobile family in the service of the Delhi Sultans. Firishta (Briggs 1829, 803–4) recounts that the Fārūqīs were “among the most respectable nobles at the Delhi Court” and that they claimed high status through descent from the Khalif ʿUmar Fārūq. Firishta records their rise to prominence with an anecdotal account that upon receiving timely help during a hunt, the Delhi Sultan Fīrūz Tughluq granted the districts of Thalner and Karanda to a young Arab from this family, Malik Rājā Fārūqī. He served the Delhi rulers well on their southern frontier and managed to subdue several recalcitrant petty chieftains in the country-side nearby. After the death of Fīrūz Tughluq in 1390, Malik Rājā, through a combination of shrewd political alliances, military boldness, and seeming sheer luck, managed to carve out an independent principality. His son, Malik Naṣīr (r. 1399–1437), captured the important Asirgarh fort and founded the cities of Zainabad and Burhanpur on the east and west banks of the Tapti River, respectively. The sites of Asirgarh and Burhanpur figure strongly in the history and self-presentation of the Fārūqī Sultans.

While the importance of these two sites could be inferred solely from the congregational (jāmi') mosques and the prominent inscriptions patronised by ʿĀdil Shāh Fārūqī, both Burhanpur and Asirgarh figure centrally in the historical accounts of Firishta and Abū’l-Faẓl. These Persian sources provide a narrative context for the bilingual inscriptions. Around twenty kilometres apart, Asirgarh and Burhanpur appear as the two major nodes of Fārūqī power. The Aʾīn-i Akbarī puts these two sites in conversation as the most notable places in Khandesh. Abū’l-Faẓl writes: “Asir is the residence of the governor, it is a fortress on a lofty hill. Three other forts encompass it which for strength and loftiness are scarcely to be equalled. A large and flourishing city is at its foot. Burhanpur is a large city three kos distant from the Tapti.”<fnref n="4" /> Citing Firishta, the *Bombay Gazetteer* (Ramsay and Pollen 1880, 234) records: “The only prosperous part of the district was near Asirgad, where Āsa, a rich Ahir, had during the famine fed the people from his grain stores and built many great works, among them the walls of Asirgad fort.” The story as told is less than flattering, in which Naṣīr Khān Fārūqī tricks the

<footnote n="4">⁴ Translation from Jarrett and Sarkar (1949, 232), italics in original.</footnote>
ruler of the fort and is able to displace its former Ahir ruler under false pretences.

Burhanpur for its part became an important religious, cultural, and mercantile centre. Originally founded by Naṣīr Ḳhān in honour of the Deccan saint Burhān al-Dīn Ḥarīb, a famed Ṣūfī whose own journey mirrors that of the Fārūqīs, beginning in North India and rising in power and prestige in the Deccan. According to Muḥammad Ṡhafi (2012), Burhanpur “commemorates his name, for [Burhān al-Dīn Ḥarīb] had given his blessings to an ancestor of its founder, Naṣīr Ḳhān Fārūqī (r. 801–41/1399–1437), when he rested here on his way to Deōgīr and foretold the rise of the Fārūqīs and their founding of the city.” The Burhanpur congregational mosque was thus central to the public persona of the Fārūqī rulers. Consecrated in 1590 by the Fārūqī Sultan ʿĀdil Shāh, the mosque was meant to stand as a testament to the longevity and power of the Khandesh Sultanate. Such self-confidence was short-lived: ʿĀdil Shāh’s son, Bahādur Ḳhān, surrendered to the Mughal forces under Akbar less than ten years later. After its conquest, Akbar himself had a new inscription carved under the left minaret placing the mosque — and by extension the Khandesh Sultanate — in a relationship of inclusion within and subservience to a new political dispensation.

<table><caption>Table 5. List of the Fārūqī sultans, showing attestation of names in the inscriptions of Asirgarh and Burhanpur, and the chronicles of Abū’l-Faẓl and Firishta</caption><thead><tr><td>Name</td><td>Regnal dates</td><td>Attestation</td></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Malik Naṣīr</td><td>1399–1437</td><td>chronicles, Burhanpur</td></tr><tr><td>Mirān ʿĀdil Ḳhān</td><td>1437–1441</td><td>chronicles</td></tr><tr><td>Mirān Mubārak</td><td>1441–1457</td><td>chronicles</td></tr><tr><td>ʿĀdil Ḳhān II</td><td>1457–1503</td><td>chronicles</td></tr><tr><td>Dāūd Ḳhān</td><td>1503–1510</td><td>chronicles</td></tr><tr><td>Ghaznī Ḳhān</td><td>1510</td><td>chronicles, Burhanpur</td></tr><tr><td>Qaiṣar Ḳhān</td><td></td><td>Burhanpur</td></tr><tr><td>Hassan Ḳhān</td><td></td><td>Burhanpur</td></tr><tr><td>ʿĀdil Ḳhān III</td><td>1510–1520</td><td>chronicles, Asirgarh, Burhanpur</td></tr><tr><td>Mirān Muḥammad</td><td>1520–1535</td><td>chronicles</td></tr><tr><td>Mubārak Ḳhān</td><td>1535–1566</td><td>chronicles, Asirgarh, Burhanpur</td></tr><tr><td>Mirān Muḥammad II</td><td>1566–1576</td><td>chronicles</td></tr><tr><td>Rājā ʿAlī Ḳhān, ʿĀdil</td><td>1576–1596</td><td>chronicles, Asirgarh, Burhanpur</td></tr><tr><td>Bahādur Ḳhān</td><td>1596–1599</td><td>chronicles</td></tr></tbody></table>
These narratives of the Fārūqī sultans and the two main sites of political power are here told in brief to contextualise the setting of ʿĀdil Shāh Fārūqī’s inscriptional project. Asirgarh was an emblem of martial strength and military power, taken through the efforts of the upwardly mobile family. Burhanpur was a symbol of both the Fārūqīs’ piety and their divine ordination. The town flourished through divine favour shown by the saint and the ingenuity of the new sultanate he had chosen to honour. ʿĀdil Shāh IV’s inscriptional project is deeply imbricated in Fārūqī history and in a project of elite self-presentation. In the two bilingual inscriptions in Asirgarh and Burhanpur, ʿĀdil Shāh Fārūqī gestures toward Malik Naṣīr’s long and expansionist reign in his epigraphical and architectural project from the end of the sixteenth century. These two key sites of Malik Naṣīr’s reign become the stage for ʿĀdil Shāh IV to present his surprising inscriptions describing and inscribing their piety and locating it in time.

### 3. Contextualising the Fārūqī Sultan’s bilingual inscriptions

The two bilingual inscriptions of ʿĀdil Shāh IV are placed at sites of architectural and religious focus in congregational mosques. Such a prestigious placement makes the interplay between languages, materiality, and ideology all the more salient. Through their spatial position and material durability, the public linguistic juxtaposition of Sanskrit and Arabic demands a careful theorisation. Unlike manuscripts, which may circulate only in rarefied elite circles, inscriptions confront the viewer; similarly, even if the viewer had no knowledge of Sanskrit (or Arabic for that matter), the difference in script is clearly manifest. There was no escaping the implied conversation of these two languages played out on the walls of Islamic religious buildings. The Sanskrit text was certainly meant to be seen, and to be seen in the context of political and religious practice of the congregational mosque.<fnref n="5" /> It was placed firmly in the Islamic visual mode (as the letters are raised in the fashion of many Perso-Arabic elite inscriptions rather than incised), yet the different script highlights a disjunction between the two languages, or at least implies that these two languages operated in different spheres. The *Asirgarh* and *Burhanpur mosque inscriptions* stand as invitations to think through the interplay of language, political power, religion, and architecture in pre-Mughal sultanate South Asia. To put it more bluntly, they call into question simple notions of religious community bounded by language,

<footnote n="5">5 See for instance Insoll (1999, esp. chapter 2).</footnote>
architecture, and practice, and demand a language practice long defined by
Hindu and Muslim religious communities in premodern South Asia.

While scholars like Steven Vose have studied the relationship of the Jainas
and the Delhi Sultanate and Audrey Truschke has investigated the complex ties
between the Sanskrit literati and the Mughal Court, there remains much to un-
cover. In particular, a careful study of the inscriptional record can highlight the
diverse habitations of Sanskrit, still important enough to be commemorated in
stone and flexible enough to speak to diverse communities in diverse spaces.
Rather than speaking of large-scale processes of state or identity formation, this
paper attempts a beginning of a microhistory, to see how languages frozen in
time, embedded in stone, and set in architectural spaces can illuminate, and
perhaps complicate, histories of language, piety, identity, and elite self-presen-
tation in medieval South Asia.

While discussions of religion and power often begin with ideology or belief, the physical presence of ‘Ādil Shāh IV’s inscriptions within a built space invites centring materiality and public practice in their contextualisation. Materiality and architecture have recently begun to take more prominent place in reconstructing the history of both sultanate polities and Hindu-Muslim interaction in South Asia. In particular, Finbarr Flood’s *Objects of Translation* (Flood 2018) and Richard Eaton and Phillip Wagoner’s *Power, Memory and Architecture* (Eaton and Wagoner 2014) have fruitfully brought material culture and architecture into the discussion of the formation of Indo-Islamicate elite practice. Flood’s *Objects of Translation* in particular looks at the negotiation of power and difference in material culture. In particular, his attention to “the mutual imbrications of animal subjects and inanimate objects” and his sensitivity to “the constitutive relationships between subjects, objects, and political formations” (Flood 2018, 12) is a guide to thinking through the complex web of relations that the bilingual inscriptions in context illuminate.

The use of language then can be seen as taking part in the same web of con-
stitutive relationships that the inscriptions' material forms instantiate. How
then to see the relationship between Arabic and Sanskrit in the inscriptions?
This question is especially salient given both Sanskrit and Arabic's status as
"cosmopolitan" languages. At a basic level, "cosmopolitan" means a learned lan-
guage that transcends regional particularity and historical contingency. How-
ever, a cosmopolitan language tends to be defined against an "other," a living
vernacular language. In the case of Sanskrit, Sheldon Pollock (1996) argues that
the "Sanskrit Cosmopolis" is an order of languages centred on Sanskrit in rela-
tion to South Asian vernaculars. Pollock bases his theory of the Sanskrit Cos-
mopolis on epigraphical data, particularly on how Sanskrit is articulated as a
language of power. This often comes into relief in the epigraphical record when Sanskrit is inscribed next to a regional language, a vernacular. While Pollock's theory has been deployed to explain South Asian cultural and literary history largely in terms of the cosmopolitan and vernacular divide, I would like to return to the basis of his theory, the order of languages in epigraphy. Pollock distinguishes two portions of the text, the documentary and the workly. "Our public poets did not confuse these two realms, they usually (and as time passed invariably) segregated them by a differentiation of codes, with two different kinds of truth, operative in two different kinds of worlds" (Pollock 1996, 242). These two different codes spoke to different concerns: Sanskrit transcended particularity and operated as the language of aesthetics and politics, while the vernacular spoke to worldly and temporal concerns.

Such a model holds for bilingual inscriptions in early Sanskrit epigraphical history. Sanskrit bilingualism works differently, however, when put next to the Islamicate languages of Arabic and Persian. Most obviously, while Sanskrit and the vernacular are different languages, they often use the same script. When Sanskrit comes next to Arabic, the difference in script is pronounced. While bilingual Sanskrit-Arabic and Sanskrit-Persian inscriptions are relatively well-known, reading the two portions of such an epigraph demands a careful contextualisation as to why each language was deployed in the context of the inscription. Given that Sanskrit is the language of public piety and political self-presentation in Hindu contexts and Arabic (and Persian) plays that role in Islamic contexts, the presence of both in a single inscription calls out for a reading of their interaction. While a clear-cut order of languages in the sense of cosmopolitan and vernacular is not present in the inscriptions of ʿĀdil Shāh IV, the presence of two languages demands a theorisation for their division of labour.

The Fārūqī inscriptions present their Sanskrit text in the *praśasti* style, a way of writing in inscriptions that stretches back to the first instantiations of Sanskrit as a language of political power in the world. Elite inscriptions thus use *praśasti* to articulate kingship. Sanskrit *praśastis* thus establish the genealogy of the dynasty, highlight the dynasty's merits, and praise the current ruler. Yet in bilingual inscriptions especially, *praśastis* and their stress on succession, sovereignty, and royal qualities are informed by the interplay between the “work” done by different languages in different portions of the inscription. To return to Pollock's model, “cosmopolitan” Sanskrit depends on what he calls “the division of labour” which exists “between cosmopolitan and vernacular language use, the one expressive and the other documentary” (2006, 121). The Sanskrit is expressive: it took part in the political aesthetic which supported all claims
toward sovereignty. The vernacular languages then took “the quotidian status and function they had in everyday life” (2006, 118).

I think it is necessary to rehearse Pollock’s arguments about *praśastis* in bilingual inscriptions here because they form the basis for his use of the term “hyperglossia,” that is to say, the order of languages in South Asia with Sanskrit on top. The aesthetic resources of Sanskrit “enabled the writer to say or write things not yet sayable or at least not yet inscribable in any of the other languages of southern Asia” (2006, 136). This model theorises the relation between South and Southeast Asian vernaculars, yet when Sanskrit is placed next to Arabic, an increasingly important elite language in South Asia, what sorts of claims are being made? What “work” do these languages do, and what does their juxtaposition mean in the context of Fārūqī elite discourse? A careful reading of the Sanskrit *praśastis* in bilingual inscriptions can shed light on elite self-presentation between Indic and Islamicate modes in the sultanate period.

In her book *Precolonial India in Practice*, Cynthia Talbot argues that instead of dealing with large-scale models of civilisational processes, careful analyses of a complex of localised factors can provide a way to think through received colonial and post-colonial notions of community, religion, state, and power that colour our scholarship on medieval South Asia. This is especially salient given the highly politicised place of religion, particularly in terms of national and communal conflict, in contemporary India. Talbot (2001, 14) privileges a “microhistory so that the biases encoded in colonial forms of knowledge can be overcome; macroscopic portrayals and master-narratives impute western forms of knowledge, thus one must get as close to the ground as possible in order to minimise their influence.” She argues that microhistorical projects and thick descriptions should provide the basis of historical work in South Asia since with these types of studies, scholars avoid “creating abstract models of reality that suppress its complexity and ambiguity” (ibid.).

The two inscriptions of ‘Ādil Shāh IV present such an opportunity to think about large issues on a small scale: how can we imagine the role of the Sanskrit language of praise poetry operating in the premier space of religious power and legitimacy in the heart of the Khandesh Sultanate? This paper argues that the division of labour in the Fārūqī mosque inscriptions shows that languages were used to do different things: Arabic was used to frame donative piety in quotations from the Qur‘ān and Hadith. Sanskrit was used for praise of God and kings and for locating the mosque precisely in time. This division of labour is different from that which characterised Pollock’s “cosmopolitan” bilingual inscriptions; however, it seems that elite actors within the Khandesh Sultanate still recognised the political and aesthetic power inherent in epigraphical Sanskrit and
deployed it next to the sacred language of Islam. In so doing, the *Asirgarh* and *Burhanpur* inscriptions present a new sort of language politics deploying the prestige of Arabic and Sanskrit into new and unexpected relation.

## 4. The Arabic inscriptions

To begin with the Arabic portions of ‘Ādil Shāh IV’s inscriptions, both are similar in placement, calligraphy, and content, and do similar ideological work. Both are placed in the prayer niche of a congregational mosque, both contain a number of lines in Arabic positioned over the Sanskrit inscription, and both are inscribed in relief — that is to say, unlike most Sanskrit and Indic-language inscriptions and like many Arabic and Persian inscriptions, the letters are raised with the negative space carved away. The similar style of letters is not surprising, given that the same person, one Muṣṭafā son of Nūr Muḥammad, is said to be the scribe for both inscriptions. The *Asirgarh inscription* consists of five lines, two of Arabic and three of Sanskrit. The *Burhanpur mosque inscription* contains three lines of Arabic and six of Sanskrit.

Outside of their physical placement and aesthetic appearance, the contents of both the *Asirgarh* and *Burhanpur* inscriptions are largely parallel. They both do similar work, focusing on the building of the mosque and the pious merit that accrues from such a construction. The Arabic inscription in both begins with two quotations praising the construction of mosques — one from the *al-Jinn* chapter of the *Qurʿān* (72.18): “And verily mosques are built for God, invoke no other God but Him” and a Hadith quotation: “And the Prophet, may peace be on him, says, ‘One who builds a mosque for Allāh, even if it be as small as the nest of a Qaṭāt bird, Allāh builds for him a house in paradise.’”<fnref n="6" /> This statement is found in the fourth chapter, “Mosques and Congregations” of the *Sunan ibn Mājah*: “It was narrated from Jābir bin ‘Abdullāh that the messenger of Allāh said ‘Whoever builds a mosque for the sake of Allāh, like a sparrow’s nest or even smaller, Allāh will build him a house in Paradise” (Khattab 2007, 1:485). This quotation is a clear reference to learned discussion of the meritorious efficacy of building a mosque and the merit that will accrue to the donor of a mosque. This short portion of the Arabic text finishes with the statement that “This auspicious mosque, which is one of the bounties of the time and like a mole on a beautiful face, was built by the order of our lord and master, the Sultan.”<fnref n="7" />

<footnote n="6">6 Translation from Rahim (1961, 56–57), typo corrected.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 Translation from Rahim (1961, 57).</footnote>
When comparing the two texts, the Arabic portion of the *Asirgarh inscription* is much simpler. After discussing the meritorious nature of mosque construction, it states that it was ordered by “ʿĀdil Shāh, son of Mubārak Shāh, son of ʿĀdil Shāh al-Fārūqī, al-ʿUmarī, al-ʿAdawī” and asks that God “accept (appreciate) his pious actions through the holy Prophet and his companions and descendants!”<fnref n="8" /> This rather truncated genealogy focuses on ʿĀdil Shāh and only goes back three generations. The *Burhanpur inscription*, by contrast, goes back six generations: “ʿĀdil Shāh, son of Mubārak Shāh, son of ʿĀdil Shāh, son of Ḥasan Khān, son of Qaiṣar Khān, son of Ghaznī Khān, son of Rājā Malik al-Fārūqī, al-ʿUmarī, al-ʿAdawī [...].”<fnref n="9" /> In both Arabic inscriptions, the genealogy is rather simply stated. Each consists merely of names connected by patrilineal descent to the current ruler. Finally, both Arabic inscriptions end with a wish for God to accept the donation.

To return to what “work” the Arabic does, the focus of the Arabic is completely on the central place of the mosque in the *Qurʿān* and the meritorious nature of the donation of a mosque. Beyond a formulaic benediction, there is no praise of God or *bismillāh* in this portion of the inscription. The Arabic portion of the inscription is an argument centred on the physical presence of the mosque and its social and political implications. The inscriptions move from *Qurʿānic* quotation to Hadith quotation to locating the mosque as the “auspicious mark” of the age, to connecting it to Sultan ʿĀdil Shāh IV and his lineage. The spiritual merit gained by the construction is further located in this specific site and in the person of the sultan and his family. While the Arabic takes pride of place, being positioned above the Sanskrit in the topmost portion of the *mihrāb*, the “worldly” portion of the text — the praise of God, the praise of kings, and the exact auspicious moment of its construction — is recorded in Sanskrit. At this point we need to turn to the Sanskrit portion of the inscription which, by its very presence, supplements, reinforces and even questions the Arabic portion, and brings us back to the question of the order of languages that ʿĀdil Shāh’s inscriptions imply.

## 5. The Sanskrit inscriptions

While it might seem that within an inscription recording the pious construction of a mosque and placed within the mosque itself, the main “religious” work of

<footnote n="8">8 Translation from *Kuraishī* (1926, 1).</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Translation from Rahim (1961, 57).</footnote>
the inscription would be done in Arabic, the Sanskrit portions of the Fārūqī mosques draw this into question. As in the case of the Arabic inscriptions, both the *Asirgarh* and *Burhanpur* Sanskrit texts are similar; however, the later *Burhanpur* inscription is an expansion and polishing of the earlier *Asirgarh* inscription. While they are not identical, they both use similar words, phrases, and concepts and can be fruitfully read together to give a sort of large field in which to place the translation of Islamic religion and Fārūqī power into Sanskrit. While the Arabic portion locates the mosque within Qur'ānic traditions, the Sanskrit portion does three discreet things: first, it praises the Islamic God; second, it eulogises the Sultanate Dynasty; and third, it provides an exact date for the construction of the mosque based on Indic calendrical models. Here I will read each of these portions in turn.

Both the *Asirgarh* and *Burhanpur* inscriptions begin with a similar benediction. As would be expected in any Sanskrit royal inscription, the Fārūqī mosque inscriptions eulogise a deity; here however we find the Muslim God placed into Sanskrit categories. The *Asirgarh inscription* begins:

> Homage to the divine person (*puruṣa*) as the maker! Homage to you, who are the essence (*ātman*) of all qualities (*guṇa*) [yet] without qualities (*nirguṇa*), whose inherent form is [both] manifest [and] unmanifest,<fnref n="10" /> whose essence is the bliss of consciousness,<fnref n="11" /> the support (*ādhāra*) of the universe (*viśva*).<fnref n="12" />

The *Burhanpur mosque inscription* for its part uses similar language to praise the Islamic God in Sanskrit. The inscription states:

> Homage to the illustrious maker of creation! The unmanifest (*avyakta*), pervading (*vyāpaka*), permanent (*nitya*), beyond qualities (*guṇātīta*), essentially consciousness (*cidātmaka*), the cause (*kāraṇa*) of what is manifest — I praise that Lord (*iśvara*), manifest and unmanifest (*vyaktāvyakta*).<fnref n="13" />

In each inscription we have the same key words repeated: manifestation (*vyakta*), quality (*guṇa*), consciousness (*cit*), and eternity (*nitya*). While none of these concepts would be foreign in the praise of a Hindu deity, the two Sanskrit

<footnote n="10">10 Or following Ḳuraishī, “manifest yet hidden.”</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 Or following Ḳuraishī, “inherent in *chit* (mind) and *anand* (happiness).”</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 *Asirgarh mosque inscription*, l. 1: *śrī-kartṛ-puruṣāya namah| guṇātmane nirguṇāya vyaktāvyakta-svarūpine| cid-ānaṁdātmane nityaṁ viśvādhārāya te namah||*. I would like to thank Dániel Balogh for the emendation of Ḳuraishī’s (1926) text viśvādhārayate to viśvādhārāya te. Here and throughout, translations from Sanskrit are my own.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 *Burhanpur mosque inscription*, l. 1: *śrī-sṛṣṭi-kartre namaḥ| avyaktaṁ vyāpakaṁ nityaṁ guṇātītaṁ cid-ātmakaṁ| vyaktasya kāraṇaṁ vaṁde vyaktāvyaktaṁ tam īśvaraṁ||*.</footnote>
texts marshal them in order to address specific aspects of Islamic theology in Sanskrit. The language here relies on certain notions of creation as well as the connection between a god that is beyond all qualities (*gunātīta*) yet still somehow present. The Burhanpur mosque is just one of many examples of how the Sanskrit language attempts to include Muslim conceptions of God. As Richard Salomon (1998, 307) noted in reference to his translation of line 1 of the *Burhan-pur mosque inscription*, “this invocatory verse is so phrased as to be acceptable to both Muslim and Hindu beliefs.” Such a statement seems true, yet why use such language at the religious focal point of an Islamic place of worship?

While I know of no other uses of Sanskrit language descriptions of the Islamic God within the religious space of a mosque, the Fārūqī inscriptions' Sanskrit description resonates with other examples from the first Sultanates. For instance, in the northwest of the Subcontinent, the mint of Maḥmūd of Ghaznī in Lahore struck a remarkable set of coins in 1027–1028.<fnref n="14" /> The *dirhams* (called in Sanskrit *ṭāṅkas*) bear the Islamic profession of faith (the *kalimat*, “there is no god but God and Muḥammad is the messenger of God”) on one side in Arabic, with a “translation” on the other side written in Sanskrit in the Śāradā script. The Sanskrit translation reads *avyaktam ekaṁ muhamadaḥ avatāraḥ nrpatiḥ mahamūdah*, “The unmanifest (*avyaktam*) is one. Muhamada is [his] *avatāra*. The king is Mahamūda.” While drawing a direct line between the Fārūqī inscriptions and the Ghaznavid coin legend is tenuous at best, it is striking to see similar language being used to make the Islamic God legible in Sanskrit.

While the languages are similar, the difference in material form and context can be instructive. In both the bilingual *dirham* and the mosque inscriptions, the essential question is about legibility: who were these different languages meant to be legible to? In the case of Maḥmūd of Ghaznī’s coin, the two sides of the coin are not direct translations, but rather separately address different elite groups across the stretch of territory where the legends of the coin would be circulated. With its connotations of mobility, exchange, and a shared language of value, Maḥmūd of Ghaznī’s bilingual *dirham* stands at the beginning of a long and experimental process of state formation and cultural negotiation underlying the stabilisation of Muslim states in South Asia. The “translation” of the praise of God in the Fārūqī inscriptions stands at the other end of this process and shows a much more complex relationship than just two complementary “sides” doing the same thing. The two halves of the inscriptions, Arabic and Sanskrit, must be read in terms of complementary legibility. Within the sacred

<footnote n="14">14 This coin has of course garnered a fair amount of scholarly attention. For an account, see A. K. Bhattacharya (1964), and Goron and Goenka (2001, xxvi–xxvii).</footnote>
and elite precincts of the mosque, the physical instantiation of the two lan-
guages portrays the ideological stabilisation of Fārūqī power. It does not matter
that neither the Sanskrit nor the Arabic would be actually understandable out-
side of small circles of elite specialists; the work that they do would be translated
by elite valorisation of their actual physical presence of the languages and their
scripts.

Following the conventions of the Sanskrit *praśasti* genre, the inscription
moves from the benediction to the *vaṁśa-prastavana*, the praise of the lineage of
the donor. Interestingly, the Sanskrit highlights the longevity of the Fārūqī lin-
eage rather than the mosque. While the Arabic-language inscriptions centre the
mosque, it is not mentioned until the very end of the Sanskrit inscriptions,
which rather focus on praise of God and of the king. Both the *Asirgarh* and the
*Burhanpur* inscriptions are similar:

Asirgarh:

As long as the moon, sun, and stars remain in the sky [and] the Gaṅgā River
on the earth, so long may that faultless lineage of the Phārukis remain upon
the earth.<fnref n="15" />

Burhanpur:

As long as the moon and sun and stars remain in the sky, so long may the
lineage of the Phārukis rejoice long on the earth!<fnref n="16" />

Similar statements are found throughout the Sanskrit epigraphical record; it is
a common stock phrase in epigraphical Sanskrit and many inscriptions even
have the sun and moon carved into the top of the record to artistically represent
the durability of which the inscriptions speak. However, it is noteworthy that
this wish for permanence is not for the pious donation, the mosque, but rather
for the patron's family.

From this statement, we move on to a general lineage of the Fārūqīs. While
the *Asirgarh inscription* does not go into the lineage in any poetic detail, the
*Burhanpur inscription* places the dynasty within Sanskrit poetic expectations. To

<footnote n="15">15 Asirgarh mosque inscription, v. 2: caṁdrārkka-tārā gaṅgādi tiṣṭhanti gagane bhuvi| tāvat phāruki-vaṁśo 'sau vimalo bhuvi tiṣṭhatu||.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 Burhanpur mosque inscription, v. 2: yāvac candrārkka-tārādi-sthitih syād aṁbarāṁgaṇe| tāvat phāruki-vaṁśo 'sau ciram naṁdatu bhū-tale||. Accepting Salomon's (1998) sthiti for Hira Lal's (1907–08) kṣiti.</footnote>
begin with the *Asirgarh* version, the inscription marshals the possibilities of Sanskrit compounding to give a short encomium of ‘Ādil Shāh IV. The text states:

[The inscription<sup>17</sup>] of the Overlord of the Kingdom of Victory, the illustrious Khandesh (ṣānadeśa), Ādila Śāha ('Ādil Shāh IV), son of Mubārakha Śāha (Mubārak Khān), son of the emperor (pātaṣāha), the seven times illustrious Ādila Śāha ('Ādil Shāh III), [that 'Ādil Shāh IV who is] the sun of splendour (*pratāpa*) that is dear to those risen (*udita*) in the illustrious family of the Phārukīs,<sup>18</sup> the full moon that bestows joy on the *cakora* birds of allies (*mitrajana*), dedicated to thinking on the God without Qualities (*nirguṇeśa*).<sup>19</sup>

Although this part of the inscription is in prose, it utilises the ornate, compound-heavy style that hearkens back to the first royal *praśastis* preserved in Sanskrit. Similarly, it deploys the term *pratāpa*, ‘heroic vigour or strength, royal splendour,’ which is key to the ideological vocabulary of kingship in Sanskrit; and likewise, the image of the king as the sun and the moon, gladdening different groups of people, is a stock trope, as is the *cakora* bird that survives by drinking moonlight. The inscription also presents the king’s sectarian affiliation in purely Sanskritic ways, saying that he is fully intent on or engaged in (*parāyaṇa*) thinking about (*cintana*) the God without Qualities (*nirguṇeśa*). Here too the Sanskrit negotiates similarity and difference; while the format is the same as would be expected for Hindu kings, the specific form of God beyond qualities is again highlighted, reinforcing the Islamic eulogy at the beginning of the inscription. It is perhaps also noteworthy that ‘Ādil Shāh is presented as ‘thinking about’ (*cintana*) rather than the more common ‘meditating upon’ (*dhyāna*) used in reference to Indic deities. Perhaps these words are merely synonyms, but it seems to me that perhaps a qualitative difference of practice is being flagged, with *cintana* being the functional equivalent of something like the Arabic *zikr*.

The genealogy in Sanskrit follows the Arabic text, referring to only two ancestors, Mubārak Shāh (r. 1535–1566) and ‘Ādil Shāh III (r. 1510–1520).<sup>20</sup> Perhaps noteworthy is the use of the Arabic *bin*, spelled in Sanskrit as *bina* to indicate

<footnote n="17">17 The word *adhipateḥ* is in genitive case without a clear antecedent. It could be taken with the mosque, the inscription, or perhaps the year from what follows.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 The *akṣara ṣi* in the inscription could be a mistake for *kī*. It could also, however, be an attempt to transcribe the Arabic *q*.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 *Asirgarh mosque inscription*, ll. 2–3: *śrīmat-phāruṣī-kulodita-prīta-pratāpa-dinakara-mitrajana-cakorānaṁda-kara-pūrṇacaṁdra-nirguṇeśa-ciṁtana-parāyaṇa-pātaṣāha-śrī-śrī 5 ādilaṣāha-bina-mubārakhaśāha-bina-ādilaṣāha-vijayarājya-śrī-ṣānadeśādhipateḥ*.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 For a full genealogy of the Fārūqī Sultans, see Table 1 above.</footnote>
‘son of.’ While the genealogy presented in the Asirgarh mosque is cursory at best, the *Burhanpur inscription* provides a more fleshed-out poetic account. In two *upajāti* stanzas, the history of the dynasty is rehearsed:

> In this lineage, it is said, there was a Lord of the Fārūqīs, the king Malika (Malik Naṣīr) by name. He had a son of noble mind, an ornament to the family, the king Gajanī (Ghaznī **Khān**). From him [was born] the hero Kesara Khāna (Kaisar **Khān**). His son [was] the king Hasana (Hasan **Khān**). After him was the king Edala Śāha ('Ādil Shāh III). He had a son, the lord Mubārakha (Mubārak **Khān**).<fnref n="21" />

As in the *Asirgarh inscription*, the names of kings mentioned in the genealogy match the names mentioned in the Arabic; however, here the genealogy is poeticised in Sanskrit verse. Each new generation gets a quarter or half stanza giving the notion of an orderly succession.<fnref n="22" /> The genealogy culminates in a glorification of ‘Ādil Shāh:

> His son, whose lotus feet are polished by the tops of the crowns of enemy kings, whose fame (*kīrti*) is real, the lord of the earth, who bows day and night to the highest *brahman* who is beyond all qualities — the illustrious King Edala ('Ādil Shāh IV) is victorious, the crowning jewel among other kings.<fnref n="23" />

Written in the *śārdūlavikrīḍita* metre, often used for texts of praise, the verse takes the same basic elements of the prose panegyric in the *Asirgarh inscription* and polishes them into ornate poetry. Each of the four quarters of the verse focuses on a different aspect of conventionalised royal representation in Sanskrit: overlordship, fame, piety, and benedictory praise. The example of crowns polishing the overlord's feet is a stock image for showing sovereignty, *ādhipatya* or *aiśvarya*. As in the *Asirgarh inscription*, ‘Ādil Shāh's *pratāpa* is specifically invoked; however, here this is paired with his great fame or renown, his *kīrti*. While the *Asirgarh inscription* spoke of the Islamic God as *nirguṇeśa*, the idea is expressed in

<footnote n="21">21 Burhanpur mosque inscription, vv. 3-4: vaṁśe 'tha tasmin kila phārukīṁdro vabhūva rājā malikābhidhānaḥ| tasyābhavat sūnur udāra-cetāḥ kulāvataṁso gajanī-nareśaḥ|| tasmād abhūt kesara-khāna-vīraḥ putras tadīyo hasana-ḳṣitīṣaḥ| tasmād abhūd edala-śāha-bhūpaḥ putro 'bhavat tasya mubārakheṁdraḥ||.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">22 Like the Arabic genealogy, the Sanskrit genealogy seems to skip some generations and rulers and paper over certain gaps and misremember some of the succession. This is not rare in Sanskrit epigraphy; for an example in Sanskrit during the sultanate period, see Obrock (2022, 65-66).</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23 Burhanpur mosque inscription, v. 5: tat-sūnuḥ ḳṣitipāla-mauli-mukuta-vyāghṛṣṭa-pādāṁbujaḥ sat-ḳīrtir vilasat-pratāpa-vaśagāmitraḥ ḳṣitīšeśvaraḥ| yasyāhar-niśam ānatir guṇa-gaṇātīte pare brahmaṇi ṣrīmān edala-bhūpatir vijayate bhūpāla-cūḍāmaṇiḥ||.</footnote>
terms not of a Lord (īśa) but rather in terms of the highest brahman. Such an
equation of a god with the parama-brahman is not uncommon, however it is
noteworthy that the text further qualifies the nirguṇeśa of the Asirgarh inscription
with clear allusions to larger theological concepts and debates coming from the
Hindu tradition.

The verse concludes with an implied benediction: “the king is victorious (vijayate).” This simple conclusion, I would argue, is the point of this entire genealogical and panegyric section of text. The terms *vijaya* in the *Asirgarh inscription* and *vijayate in the Burhanpur inscription* anchor the entire genealogical/panegyric section. The culmination of the Sanskrit is a royal benediction for the king to prosper on earth. Such a desire is absent from the Arabic section, which focuses on piety and the mosque itself. Here, then, it seems that a division of labour is being worked out between two languages. While Arabic is the language of piety in the world (instantiated in the mosques themselves), Sanskrit is the language of kingship performed in the world. The positioning of the words *vijaya/vijayate* marks the performance of kingly power. On one hand, the Arabic presents the king in a documentary way as a pious donor and asks God to remember his piety. On the other, the Sanskrit is written from the perspective of ritualised praise, in which the king is the locus of genealogical pedigree, hierarchical political power, fame and renown, and religious devotion. Sanskrit poetic language here still fills the role of political self-presentation, even within the sacred precincts of a mosque.

The first two portions of the Sanskrit text speak to a translational project in
which Indic notions of divinity and kingship are marshalled to serve the Fārūqī
project. Again, this “work” is different from the work done by the Arabic sec-
tion. However, along with the Sanskrit panegyric verses, the establishment of
the date of the mosque takes up the most space in the Sanskrit inscriptions of
ʿĀdil Shāh IV. In the *Burhanpur inscription*, the calculation of the exact astrolog-
ical conjunction of the mosque’s construction takes up almost one third of the
entire inscription. It does not simply state the year (as is given in the Arabic
portion) but rather the exact astrological moment at which construction began.
This speaks to a relationship between the royal court and astronomers deeply
learned in Sanskritic conventions. It also implies that ʿĀdil Shāh IV began con-
struction of the mosque at an auspicious moment in consultation with astrolo-
gers learned in Indic systems. While the year is simply stated in the Hijri era in
the Arabic, the Sanskrit gives the year in two different reckoning systems and
speaks of particular astronomical moments on a specific day in a particular
month. It is only after the precise date and time of the construction is given that
the mosque (in Sanskrit, *masīti*) itself is finally mentioned.
This final line of the Sanskrit inscription echoes some of the language and concerns of the Arabic, although in a truncated form. First is the mention of the physical space of the mosque itself, which is absolutely essential to the Arabic portion. This mosque then is placed within the field of pious donation through the Sanskrit compound svadharma-pālana (for the sake of nourishing/protecting his own religion). While thus we have a return to the central concerns of the Arabic, perhaps bookending the inscription in a sort of bilingual ring structure, this seems almost an afterthought after the amount of time and energy spent on praise and astrological calculation.

To conclude this investigation of the Sanskrit section of the *Asirgarh* and *Burhanpur* inscriptions, I would like to return to the larger question: what did ‘Ādil Shāh use Sanskrit to do? Both inscriptions share a common imagination of the structure of the Sanskrit and what the Sanskrit was supposed to say. Both inscriptions repeat the same general topics, although clearly the later Burhanpur text presents the most fully formed and most polished version. In this way there seems to be an underlying assumption about what Sanskrit does, its role in the political imagination of the Fārūqī sultans. To put it succinctly, in ‘Ādil Shāh IV’s inscriptions, Sanskrit is the language of praise, lineage, and auspicious occasions. To return then to Pollock’s distinction between the “workly” and the “documentary,” Sanskrit here appears to be doing the same work that it did in “cosmopolitan” Sanskrit inscriptions. Yet, the positioning of the texts — the Arabic above the Sanskrit — speaks to a different sort of language hierarchy than in earlier Sanskrit bilingual epigraphic texts.

## 6. Conclusion

While the Arabic portion of the Fārūqī bilingual inscriptions state that “mosques are for Allāh,” the Sanskrit portion rather highlights how the mosque is for the Fārūqīs, particularly ‘Ādil Shāh IV, as it instantiates the worldly power of the Sultan, as a king and devotee. While the Arabic portion of the inscription serves to place the Fārūqīs and their mosque within an Islamic set of relations, much of the “work” of the inscription in the lived world of kingship in practice is done by the Sanskrit, especially in its utility as a language of praise and as the language of auspicious astrological calculation. In this reading then, the mosque is “for” a lot of things, and each language refers back to different traditions of elite piety and self-presentation. However, it is in the juxtaposition that ‘Ādil Shāh Fārūqī’s ideology of kingship becomes visible, as his epigraphical project puts Sanskrit and Arabic into a new and evocative relationship. Unlike the
Veraval inscription, which clearly speaks to two communities in the two lan-
guages and presupposes “insider” and “outsider” groups to religious communi-
ties, the Fārūqī inscriptions speak to one undifferentiated community of the
twin poles of authority instantiated by the mosques, God, and the king. While
such a juxtaposition of Sanskrit and Arabic in a mosque is not (to my knowledge)
found elsewhere in South Asia, it seems to me that ʿĀdil Shāh IV is just one in-
stantiation of the creative negotiations occurring between Sanskrit and other
emergent modes of expression from the increasingly Islamicate culture in India.
These negotiations continue throughout the sultanate period, and the extant
fragments of Sanskrit that exist speak to the ongoing way different agents re-
sorted to, adopted, and adapted Sanskritic literary forms for their own purposes
outside of centralised courtly spaces.

When the two portions of the bilingual inscriptions are read together, a pic-
ture of the division of labour between Sanskrit and Arabic begins to take shape.
Arabic is the language of piety and religion which sets the donation of the
mosque within canonical Islamic ideas of piety. In the Sanskrit portion of the
inscriptions, political representation takes centre stage and ʿĀdil Shāh IV uses
it as the language of the public performance of power. While the meritorious
nature of his pious gift is adumbrated in the Arabic, its location within the world
is done in Sanskrit.

The sultanate period has been long overlooked as a site of creative engage-
ment with the aesthetic and political utility of Sanskrit, yet as the bilingual
dirham of Maḥmūd of Ghaznī shows, Sanskrit was an integral part of royal self-
presentation for many Muslim polities from their very inception. The Asirgarh
and Burhanpur mosque inscriptions stand at the end of this period of creative ne-
gotiation of new forms of political expression. In the coming decades, the
Mughal Empire consolidated its political and aesthetic supremacy, and the de-
centralised and experimental dynamic of various sultanate polities was eclipsed
as they assimilated into the Mughal Imperium. In fact, the ascendancy of
Mughal power is itself inscribed on the very same sites so central to ʿĀdil Shāh
IV’s project. On January 26, 1601 CE (22nd of Rajab, 1009 Hijri), the Mughal forces
took the Fort of Asirgarh. Faced with the overwhelming might of the Mughal
Army, the last Sultan, ʿĀdil Shāh IV’s son Bahādur Khān, submitted to Emperor
Akbar’s forces. While similar events happened at numerous sultanates large and
small throughout South Asia, the Fārūqī Sultans’ defeat is noteworthy for its
material commemoration in a set of public inscriptions in Persian. Emperor
Akbar commanded the Mughal courtier, calligrapher, and poet Mīr Muḥammad
Maʿṣūm of Bhakkar, also known by his penname of Nāmī, to record the Mughal
victory in a set of Persian verses to be inscribed at the entrance of the Asirgarh