(Kṛṣṇarāja) forcibly made the earth, seized in combat, an affectionate female servant of the two feet of his master (Nāgabhaṭa II). From him was born he, the king Śaṁkaragaṇa, who won many battles.<fnref n="17" />

In this expression too, the personal valour and military achievement of the pro-
tagonist loom large.

The eulogies of the Gurjara-Pratihāras tend to emphasise the valour and mil-
itary achievement of the kings in the struggle over Kannauj. This may be due to
the fact that most of them appear in the inscriptions of their subordinate rulers,
who also claim their own contributions to the victories with emphasis on per-
sonal valour exhibited in the battlefields. This tendency is shared by the eulogy
of the Gurjara-Pratihāra kings themselves in the Gwalior inscription, though it
also tries to present Nāgabhaṭa II as a virtuous king superior to his opponents,
Cakrāyudha and Dharmapāla.

5. The Rāṣṭrakūṭas: insignia and imperial vision

The earliest securely dated Rāṣṭrakūṭa inscription mentioning the struggle over Kannauj is the Nesarikā grant of Govinda III, ŚS 727 (805 CE). Its verse 8, which is reproduced in all the charters of the same king and his brother Kambha, and the Javakheda plates of Amoghavarṣa I following the same praśasti template,<fnref n="18" /> extols the deed of Dhruva, the father of Govinda III, in the struggle as follows:

Speedily driving Vatsarāja, who was intoxicated by the royal fortune (rājya-kamalā) of Gauḍa appropriated easily, to the trackless centre of desert by his matchless army, he (Dhruva) took away from him not only a pair of umbrellas of the Gauḍa king, white like beams of the autumnal moon, but also at the same moment his fame standing at the end of the quarters of heaven.<fnref n="19" />

Dhruva's victory over Vatsarāja, who had defeated Dharmapāla, established his
position superior to both. At the same time, it is remarkable that his superiority

<footnote n="17">17 Chatsu stone inscription of Bālāditya, v. 14: *pratijñāṁ prāk kṛtvodbhaṭa-kari-ghaṭā-saṁkaṭa-raṇe bhaṭaṁ jitvā gauḍa-ksītipam avaniṁ saṁgara-hṛtāṁ| valād dāsīm cakre prabhu-caraṇayor yaḥ praṇayinīm tato bhūpaḥ so 'bhūj jita-vahu-raṇaḥ saṁkaragaṇaḥ||.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 For a list of the Rāṣṭrakūṭa inscriptions containing the same verse, labelled as stanza 8 of the genealogy ‘2’ by Annette Schmiedchen, and the classified data of them, see Schmiedchen (2014, 33 Table 2, 468-471, 473, and 475, Nos 25-34, 40, and 46).</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 Nesarikā grant of Govinda III, ŚS 727, v. 8: helā-svīkṛta-gauḍa-rājya-kamalā-mattaṁ praveśyācirāt durmmārgaṁ maru-madhyam aprativalair yo vatsarājaṁ valaih| gauḍiyaṁ śarad-indu-pāda-dhavaṁ cchatra-dvayaṁ kevalaṁ tasmān nāhṛta tad-yaśo 'pi kakubhāṁ prāṁte sthitam tat-kṣaṇāt||.</footnote>
is expressed as his acquisition of two white umbrellas, the symbol of the kingship of Gauḍa.

The motif of the acquisition of royal insignia is repeated in a refined manner in verses 21 to 24 of the same charter, which eulogise Govinda III:

> A fish from the lord of Pāṇḍya country, a bull from the master of the Pallavas, a tiger from the Cola, an elephant from the Gaṅga and a bow from the Kerala [king], a boar from the Andhra, Cālukya and Maurya [kings], a gentleman associated with a [door] panel (a doorkeeper) from the master of the Gūrjaras, a bull from the master of the Pallavas, the names (of each) from both the kings of Kosala and Avanti, and also from the Siṁhala [king], the renowned goddess Tārā from Dharma, the king of Vaṅgāla — thus having taken away these and other insignia of kings, Jagattuṅga {the one at the peak of the world} (Govinda III) bestowed the seal of Garuḍa on the entire world.<fnref n="20" />

As many as thirteen kings, including the Pallava king mentioned twice, are listed as those from whom Govinda III took away their royal insignia. Among them, Dharmapāla, the Pāla king, receives a special treatment. He is explicitly mentioned by name, and his royal emblem, the Goddess Tārā, is described as “renowned,” though calling him the king of Vaṅgāla is a bit of misnomer, another case of the misconception of outsiders.<fnref n="21" /> Still, he is depicted as one of the kings over whom the Rāṣṭrakūṭa king wielded suzerainty represented by the Garuḍa seal. The same can be said of the Gurjara-Pratihāra king, presumably Nāgabhaṭa II, whose royal insignia were also taken away. Thus, the motif of royal insignia merges with the imperial vision, and both rivals in the struggle over Kannauj are incorporated in the order headed by the Rāṣṭrakūṭa king.

The motif of the acquisition of symbols of kingship is also worked out in the *Baroda plates of Karka II*, a ruler of the collateral Rāṣṭrakūṭa lineage of Gujarat serving Govinda III, dated ŚS 734 (812 CE), in describing the deed of Dhruva:

<footnote n="20">20 Nesarikā grant of Govinda III, ŚS 727, vv. 21–24: pāṇḍya-deśādhipān matsyaṁ vrṣabhaṁ pallaveśvarāc| colād vyāghraṁ gajaṁ gaṅgāc cāpa-yaṣṭim ca keralāt|| aṁdhra-cālukya-mauryebhyo varāhaṁ gūryareśvarāt| phalaka-prativaddhāryaṁ vrṣabhaṁ pallaveśvarāt|| kosalāvaṁti-nāthābhyām siṁhalād api nāmakaṁ| tārām bhagavatīm khyātām dharmād vaṅgāla-bhūmipāt|| ittham etāny athānyāni cihnāny ādāya bhū-bhujām| garuḍāṅkaṁ jagattuṅgo vyadhatta sakalaṁ jagat||. Annette Schmiedchen (2014, 85) points out the fact that only the Nesarikā grant contains these stanzas.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">21 For Vaṅgāla denoting the coastal area of southeastern Bengal constituting a part of Vaṅga, see Furui (2020, 29).</footnote>
To him (Dhruva) was born the son, Govindarāja, a Puruṣa of fame. He (Dhruva), taking both Gaṅgā and Yamunā, beautiful with waves, from the enemies, at the same time acquired the lordship of the highest position in person as well as on the pretext of symbols, as if the quarters were pervaded by his roaming virtues whose profusion was not measurable by [his own] body.<fnref n="22" />

Here, obtaining Gaṅgā and Yamunā, in images or as jars of their water,<fnref n="23" /> is equated with the acquisition of the territory between the two rivers. Both symbolise universal kingship.

The deeds of Dhruva and Govinda III in the struggle over Kannauj are also described in the inscriptions of the time of Amoghavarṣa I (r. c. 814–878), the latter’s son. The first case to mention is verse 5 of the *Nilgund stone inscription* eulogising Govinda III, dated year ŚS 788 (866 CE), which is also found in the *Sirur stone inscription* of the same year:

> Having bound the Keralas, Mālavas and Gauḍas, along with the Gurjaras, those staying at the fort of Citrakūṭa mountain and the masters of Kāñcī, he (Govinda III) became a Nārāyaṇa of fame (Kīrtinārāyaṇa).<fnref n="24" />

In this description, the Pālas are incorporated in the scheme of the conquest of the quarters as the rulers of the east, while the Keralas, Mālavas and the Pallavas of Kāñcī constitute the kings of other three directions. The Gurjara-Pratihāras are given a secondary treatment alongside the three kings, together with some anonymous kings staying at the Citrakūṭa fort, which may include the Guhilas subordinate to the Gurjara-Pratihāras.

The *Sanjan plates of Amoghavarṣa I*, dated ŚS 793 (871 CE), on the other hand, give descriptions with more specificity, depicting a deed of Dhruva in the following manner:

> He (Dhruva) took away the white umbrellas, which were lotuses for the play of Lakṣmī, of the king of Gauḍa running away in the middle of the Gaṅgā and Yamunā.<fnref n="25" />

<footnote n="22">22 Baroda plates of Karka II, ŚS 734, v. 17: yo gaṅgā-yamune taraṅga-subhage grhṇan parebhyaḥ samaṁ| sākṣāc cihna-nibhena cottama-padaṁ tat prāptavān aisvaraṁ| dehāsammita-vaibhavair iva guṇair yyasya bhamadbhir ddiśo| vyāptās tasya babhūva kīrtti-puruṣo govinda-rājaḥ sutaḥ||.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23 For the interpretation that Gaṅgā and Yamunā denote jars of their water, the acquisition of which symbolises universal sovereignty, see Inden (1990, 259).</footnote>

<footnote n="24">24 Nilgund stone inscription of the time of Amoghavarṣa I, ŚS 788, v. 5: kera-ma{l}ava-gau{d}ān sa-gurjarāṁś citrakūṭa-giri-durgga-sthān| baddhvā kāñcīśān atha sa kīrttinārāyaṇo jātaḥ||.</footnote>

<footnote n="25">25 Sanjan plates of Amoghavarṣa I, ŚS 793, v. 14: gaṅgā-yamunayor mmadhye rājño gauḍasya naśyataḥ| lakṣmī-līlāravindāni śveta-cchattrāṇi yo harat||.</footnote>
The motif of the acquisition of royal insignia reappears here with the addition of a specific incident, the defeat of Dharmapāla at the area between the two riv- ers.

The tendency towards specificity is also found in the verses describing the deeds of Govinda III, which refer to the names of the kings.

After snatching away the irremovable true fame of the two kings Nāgabhaṭa [II] and Candragupta in battles, then he (Govinda III), devoted to the acquisi- tion of fame, uprooted kings deficient in fortitude on [their] own land and planted others in [their] position, like paddy seedlings.

The water of springs at the mountains of Himavat was drunk by [his] horses, and that of the Gaṅgā by [his] elephants. And the roar of its (Gaṅgā's) thun- dering in its ravine was doubled again by musical instruments (tūrya) accom- panying [his ritual] immersion. Those Dharma and Cakrāyudha surrendered themselves to him (Govinda III), the great one. He was (like) Himavat, as he attained resemblance [to it] in terms of fame, so that he was [called] Nārāyaṇa of fame (Kīrtinārāyaṇa).<fnref n="26" />

The defeat of Nāgabhaṭa II and Candragupta, the Pāṇduvaṁśin king of Dakṣiṇa Kosala, and the voluntary submission of Dharmapāla and Cakrāyudha are em- bedded in the lofty claim of uprooting and implanting kings, and conquest reaching the Himalayan Mountains.

The eulogies in the Rāṣṭrakūṭa inscriptions referring to the struggle over Kannauj show their peculiarity in a recurrent rhetoric of the acquisition of royal insignia equated with kingship. This rhetoric is combined with the specificity of the involved persons, locations, and events. Remarkably, both rhetoric and specificity are played out in reference to the imperial vision, in which the Rāṣṭrakūṭa kings reign over all the other kings on the earth, including the Pālas and the Gurjara-Pratihāras, the main adversaries in the struggle over Kannauj.

<footnote n="26">26 Sanjan plates of Amoghavarṣa I, ŚS 793, vv. 22–23: *sa nāgabhaṭa-candragupta-nrpayor yaśo ’ryaṁ raṇeṣv ahāryam apahārya dhairyavikalān athonmūlayaṭ| yaśorjjana-paro nrpān sva-bhuvi śāli-sasyān iva punaḥ punar atiṣṭhipat sva-pada eva cānyān api|| himavat-parvvata-nirjjharāmvu turagaiḥ pītañ ca gāṁgañ gajair ddhvanitaṁ majjana-tūryakair dviguṇitaṁ bhūyo ’pi tat-kandare| svayam evopanatau ca yasya mahatas tau dharma-cakrāyudhau himavān kīrtti-sarūpatām upagatas tat kīrtti-nārāyaṇaḥ||.</footnote>
## 6. Concluding remarks

In depicting the same events in the struggle over Kannauj, the eulogies in the inscriptions of the Pālas, the Gurjara-Pratihāras, and the Rāṣṭrakūṭas show differences in their emphases and perspectives. The Pāla eulogies are devoted to a single event, the coronation of Cakrāyudha by Dharmapāla, obscuring the presence of adversaries other than Indrāyudha. The Gurjara-Pratihāras emphasise the personal valour and military achievements of the kings and their subordinate rulers. In the eulogies of the Rāṣṭrakūṭa kings, the acquisition of the royal insignia of other kings, who are incorporated into their imperial order, looms large.

This difference, on the one hand, could come from the different degrees and forms of involvement in the struggle, and the outcomes from them. The Pālas, on the losing side despite being a main participant, have to concentrate on the one moment of their glory. The Gurjara-Pratihāras, another active participant and the ultimate winner, boast their victory achieved by valour. The Rāṣṭrakūṭas, for whom the struggle over Kannauj was just one of the military campaigns they fought in all the directions, locate their victories within the imperial vision.

On the other hand, the difference could be connected with the power structures reflected in the inscriptions. The Pālas, who kept their subordinate rulers under check, consistently narrate the single story of royal success in the grants they issued monopolistically. In case of the Gurjara-Pratihāras, both the kings and autonomous subordinate rulers under them present diverse moments of valour and achievement as shared memories in their respective inscriptions. The Rāṣṭrakūṭas, competing with other imperial contenders for supremacy, put more emphasis on the capture of royal insignia, which symbolically demonstrates their superiority over other kings in their own inscriptions.

All the participants, even the Pālas, shared a particular notion of power and order of their period, represented by concepts of *digvijaya* and universal kingship over all the others. How it could be, or could not be, substantialised in eulogies depended on the actuality of political events and power structures, as the depictions analysed above show.
## 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.

* Baroda plates of Karka II, ŚS 734: Fleet (1883a); Salomon (1998, 284-96).

* Bhagalpur plate of Nārāyaṇapāla, year 17: BengalCharters00091; Sircar (1983, 80-86).

* Bharat Kala Bhavan plate of Rājyapāla, year 2: BengalCharters00108; Furui (2016).

* Chatsu stone inscription of Bālāditya: Bhandarkar (1913-14); Sircar (1983, 363-71).

* Gwalior stone inscription of Bhoja I: Majumdar (1925-26b); Sircar (1983, 242-46).

* Indian Museum plate of Dharmapāla, year 26: BengalCharters00099; Furui (2011b).

* Jagajjibanpur plate of Mahendrapāla, year 7: BengalCharters00073; S. C. Bhattacharya (2005-06).

* Jodhpur stone inscription of Bāuka, year 894 Vikrama Era: Majumdar (1925-26a); Sircar (1983, 236-41).

* Khalimpur plate of Dharmapāla, year 32: BengalCharters00088.

* Mohipur plate of Gopāla II, year 3: BengalCharters00109; Furui (2008).

* Mahābhārata: De (1940).

* Nesarikā grant of Govinda III, ŚS 727: Gupta (1961-62); Sircar (1961-62a).

* Nilgund stone inscription of the time of Amoghavarṣa I, ŚS 788: Fleet (1900-01).

* Sanjan plates of Amoghavarṣa I, ŚS 793: Bhandarkar (1925-26); Sircar (1983, 478-94).

* Sirur stone inscription of the time of Amoghavarṣa I, ŚS 788: Fleet (1883b).

* Stone inscription of Gallaka, ŚS 717: Ramesh and Tewari (1975-76).

* Suvarnakarikadanda plate of Gopāla II, year 4 (no. 1): BengalCharters00111; Furui (2009).

* Suvarnakarikadanda plate of Gopāla II, year 4 (no. 2): BengalCharters00112; Furui (2009).
# Claiming Sovereignty on the Edge of the Imperial Kingdom: the Pālas of Kāmarūpa and the Candras of Vaṅga

Jae-Eun Shin

The University of Tokyo,
Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia

## 1. Introduction

The Pāla dynasty was one of the strongest polities of early medieval India, holding sway over northern and western Bengal and eastern Bihar and making occasional expeditions to neighbouring regions and beyond, for about three hundred and fifty years between the second half of the eighth and the end of the eleventh centuries. However, despite its dominant position, the existence of constant Pāla control over the eastern region is very difficult to justify, because the level of Pāla military supremacy and political influence was different in terms of time and space, and accordingly, the Pālas' relationship with other powers of the region has undergone substantial changes. Among several transitional phases of Pāla history, the beginning of the tenth century was of particular interest because of both internal and external events. While within the domain of the family, the Pāla royal succession shifted from the main line of rulers to a collateral line, in the adjoining areas of the Pāla territory, two new dynasties, the Pālas of Kāmarūpa and the Candras of Vaṅga, grew at the expense of the Pāla dominance. The relations between these fast-rising powers and the imperial Pāla kingdom were complicated given their geographical proximity. Not only did both conflict with the imperial Pāla dynasty, but they also took advantage of the latter's fame by appropriating its political idiom and vocabulary. This, however, does not mean that the two neighbouring dynasties contending against Pāla authority were each other's allies, nor does it imply that they had congenial relations. In reality, the two powers clashed with each other as each of them fought against the imperial Pālas.

The dominant scholarly concern of the past several decades was to unravel this tangled history with an accurate assessment of the political and military
events reflected in the epigraphical records of the three dynasties.<fnref n="1" /> This posi-
tivist historiography, despite its internal differences, seems so preoccupied with
reconstructing a sequence of events in chronological terms that it pays almost
no attention to a time discrepancy between the occurrence of an event and that
event being recorded. And also, it seldom addresses the question why a refer-
ence to self or others in previous political events and warfare assumed its im-
portance at a particular moment in the dynastic history. This lack of interest in
time is symptomatic of a wider problem, which might be glossed as an underes-
timation of the contextual articulation of self and others in epigraphic records.
In considering these issues, I focus on how the details of historical incidents de-
scribed in royal eulogies relate to their changing political and religious contexts
and how mutual perception and self-representation are expressed through
these details including the time of articulation, point of accentuation, and
choice of terms and expressions. The primary sources utilised here consist of
twenty-seven copperplate charters, of which nine were issued by the rulers of
the Kāmarūpa Pālas, eleven by those of the Candras and seven by those of the
imperial Pālas of Bengal, all belonging to a period between the beginning of the
tenth and the mid-eleventh centuries. By examining these records with a spe-
cific attention to time and comparing them in spatial terms, we can get some
idea of how the two lesser dynasties having uneven power relations with the
imperial Pālas recognised this strongest polity of eastern India and, conversely,
how they viewed themselves and others in a transitional period of history.

2. Self-representation in the changing political contexts

After the failed attempt to establish their control over Kannauj, the focal point
of the tripartite struggle in the late eighth to the early ninth century,<fnref n="2" /> political
activities of the Pālas were redirected to eastern India. Their military expedi-

<footnote n="1">1 For general historical writings on the Kāmarūpa Pālas and the Candras of Vaṅga which include this complicated history of conflicts and disputes, see Dani (1960, 36–44); Chowdhury (1967, 154–89); Sircar (2007, 140–71); Islam (2018, 551–690). For some examples of historiography more focused on their relationship itself, see Chowdhury (1978, 33–39); Choudhury (1988, 105–46); Ghosh (2010–11, 110–18).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 The tripartite struggle means the fight for control over Kannauj (Kānyakubja) between three major early medieval powers, namely, the Pālas of Bengal, the Gurjara-Pratihāras of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, and the Rāṣṭrakūṭas of the Deccan. For details, see Furui’s contribution in this volume, pp. 57ff.</footnote>
tions, which were carried out in the northeastern and southwestern directions from north Bengal, reached victorious outcomes and therefore the geographical limit of Pāla dominion extended to Kāmarūpa, Nepāla, and Utkala in the first half of the ninth century.<fnref n="3" /> However, over the next one hundred years, the situation changed considerably in two aspects, namely, a significant decline in Pāla military activities and increasing attempts to tighten control over Pāla subordinate rulers and rural society. The former is attested by the Pāla *praśastis* of the period which contain fulsome praise for the rulers’ valour and fame, while making no mention of any specific military campaigns. We are not yet sure whether such military stagnancy was directly related to the shifting of Pāla royal succession from the main line of rulers to a collateral line, i.e. to the family of Vākpāla, a brother of the second king Dharmapāla, in the late ninth century. An in-depth discussion of how such a political change affected the Pāla military power, which depended heavily on their subordinate rulers’ service, is beyond the scope of this paper. What is clear is that the political sphere of Nārāyaṇapāla (r. c. 878–932), the first king of the collateral line, was only limited to south Bihar and north Bengal,<fnref n="4" /> and his three successors, Rājyapāla II (r. c. 932–969), Gopāla III (r. c. 969–975), and Vigrahapāla II (r. c. 975–987), made no attempt to expand the zone of Pāla political control beyond the dynasty’s core territory. The reigns of these three rulers were therefore deemed “a period of inaction and stagnation” (Chowdhury 2018, 750). They rather sought to consolidate and

<footnote n="3">3 Devapāla’s (r. c. 812–847) victory against the kings of Kāmarūpa, Nepāla, and Utkala has been emphasised repeatedly in the records of his successors. There are three examples. The *Jagajjibanpur plate of Mahendrapāla, year 7* (r. c. 847–862) speaks (v. 10) of Devapāla’s dominion over Kāmarūpa obtained by the play of eyebrow and his acceptance of tribute from the inaccessible land of the Himālaya. Here the inaccessible land of the Himālaya probably refers to Nepāla in view of the *Mirzapur plate of Śūrapāla I, year 3* (v. 12), which mentions Devapāla as the conqueror of the lord of Nepāla (*nepāla-nātha-vijayi*). The *Bhagalpur plate of Nārāyaṇapāla, year 17* (v. 6) mentions that when his grandfather Jayapāla, by the order of Devapāla, set forth with the desire to conquer all around, the king of Utkala gave up his own city and the king of Prāgjyotiṣa (i.e. Kāmarūpa) surrendered to Jayapāla. However, in the same period, the Pālas did not or could not expand their political control to the eastern part of Bengal: Vaṅga, Samataṭa, and Harikela.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">4 This point is clear from the findspots of Nārāyaṇapāla’s inscriptions and the inscriptions mentioning his name. The *Gaya temple inscription* of his 7th year and the image inscription of his 9th year in the Indian Museum are believed to have been found in Bihar. See Sircar (1963–64, 225); Banerji (1915, 62 Pl. 31). The *Bhagalpur plate* of his 17th year, which was issued from Mudgagiri (Munger), proves that he was the master of Magadha (Patna and Gaya Districts) including Aṅga (Munger and Bhagalpur Districts), according to Chowdhury (2018, 749). The *Badal pillar inscription* discovered in Dinajpur proves his suzerainty over the northern part of Bengal.</footnote>
enhance royal power within their dominion with new measures which include (1) a decrease of royal grants to the religious institutions founded by subordination rulers and the increased implantation of Brāhmaṇas as agents of royal authority through grants, and (2) an imposition of land measurement and assessment of production in currency units for tightening control over rural society. The implementation of such measures had begun during the reign of Gopāla II (r. c. 874–878) and continued for over two hundred years and more, albeit not necessarily in a constant way (Furui 2017, 356, 349–52).

The Pālas' inward-oriented politics may have led to a change in the geo-political configuration of tenth-century eastern India, which was partly responsible for the emergence of the Pālas of Kāmarūpa ruling the lower Brahmaputra valley in the western part of present Assam and the Candras of Vaṅga ruling the Bengal Delta and the eastern fringe of Bengal including Samataṭa and Śrīhaṭṭa in present Bangladesh. The former was established with the rule of Brahmapāla (r. c. 900–920) and the latter with that of Trailokyacandra (r. c. 905–925). Both were contemporary with Nārāyaṇapāla (r. c. 878–932), the first king of the collateral line of the imperial Pāla rulers. Though Brahmapāla and Trailokyacandra achieved power through different political processes, the resemblance between the two kings is noteworthy. They both rose from a subordinate position to an independent, or semi-independent, status;<fnref n="5" /> consolidated their control of core areas with military strength and so laid the foundation of their families; and, eventually, paved the way for their sons' ascendency. Certain similarities continued with the next rulers of the two dynasties: Ratnapāla (r. c. 920–960), son of Brahmapāla, and Śrīcandra (r. c. 925–975), son of Trailokyacandra. Having

<footnote n="5">5 The ancestors of Trailokyacandra were probably landowners of Rohitagiri, i.e. Rāṅgāmāṭi in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, under the kings of Harikela of the Chittagong region and its adjacent areas. He rose from a subordinate position to the kingship of Candradvīpa, also known as Vaṅgāladeśa. The name Vaṅgāla, denoting the coastal regions of southeastern Bengal, gradually extended its meaning over wide areas of eastern Bengal with the expansion of Candra dominion towards the north, that is to say, the localities represented by the modern districts of Faridpur and Dacca. Trailokyacandra ultimately took possession of the citadel of Vikramapura. For the origin and early development of the Candra family, see Sircar (1959–60b, 135–36); Chowdhury (1967, 159–61). Similarly, Brahmapāla rose from a subordinate ruler of his overlord (the last king of the Mleccha dynasty) to the ruler of Kāmarūpa, but nothing is yet known about his ancestors. The name Kāmarūpa denotes the area lying on both the upper and lower banks of the Brahmaputra and also the surrounding hilly area. The Karatoya river of north Bengal remained as the western boundary of Kāmarūpa by the sixteenth century.</footnote>
assumed the imperial titles *parameśvara-paramabhaṭṭāraka-mahārājādhirāja*,<fnref n="6" /> both second-generation kings established a new capital within their respective domains, i.e. Durjayā in Kāmarūpa and Vikramapura in Vaṅga, due to the strategic importance of each location in the control of river traffic. Besides, both kings took an aggressive policy to expand their sphere of influence far beyond their respective political centres.<fnref n="7" /> The rulers of the three dynasties are listed with their approximate reign periods in Table 1.

<table><caption>Table 1. The Bengal Pāla, Kāmarūpa Pāla, and Candra dynasties in the 10th-11th centuries</caption><thead><tr><th>Bengal Pāla</th><th>Kāmarūpa Pāla</th><th>Candra</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Nārāyaṇapāla<br>(878–932)</td><td>Brahmapāla<br>(900–920)</td><td>Trailokyacandra<br>(905–925)</td></tr><tr><td>Rājyapāla II<br>(932–969)</td><td>Ratnapāla<br>(920–960)</td><td>Śrīcandra<br>(925–975)</td></tr><tr><td>Gopāla III<br>(969–975)</td><td>Indrapāla<br>(960–990)</td><td></td></tr><tr><td>Vigrahapāla II<br>(975–987)</td><td></td><td>Kalyāṇacandra<br>(975–1000)</td></tr><tr><td>Mahīpāla I<br>(987–1035)</td><td>Gopāla<br>(990–1015)</td><td></td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Harṣapāla<br>(1015–1035)</td><td>Laḍahacandra<br>(1000–1020)</td></tr><tr><td>Nayapāla<br>(1036–1051)</td><td>Dharmapāla<br>(1035–1060)</td><td>Govindacandra<br>(1020–1045)</td></tr></tbody></table>

In this context, the claim that their predecessors were “chosen by the people” took on a special significance. This reference was obviously an intertextual echo

<footnote n="6">⁶ The *Bargaon plate of Ratnapāla*, ll. 51–52; the *Paschimbhag plate of Śrīcandra*, year 5, ll. 26–27.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ For the political development of the Pālas of Kāmarūpa during the reign of Brahmapāla and Ratnapāla, see Sircar (2007, 140–47). For that of the Candras of Vaṅga during the reign of Trailokyacandra and Śrīcandra, see Chowdhury (1967, 154–79); Islam (2018, 616–25).</footnote>
of the foundation myth of the Pālas of Bengal, which had already been men-
tioned in two of their earliest charters, namely, the *Indian Museum plate* and the
*Khalimpur plate*, both issued by Dharmapāla (r. c. 780–812) in his regnal years 26
and 32, respectively. The two records trace the Pālas’ descent from Dayitaviṣṇu,
the progenitor of the lineage, and his successor Vapyaṭa, and then narrate the
installation of Gopāla, son of Vapyaṭa, as a king elected by the people. They both
read, “His son was the crest-jewel of the heads of kings, the glorious Gopāla,
whom the people (*prakṛtibhir*) made take the hand of Fortune, to put an end to
the rule of fishes.”<fnref n="8" /> However, neither of them gives any details of the situation
which was designated such an anarchical world or the people who took part in
the installation of Gopāla as the first Pāla king. Considering the complete ab-
sence of this statement in the *Nalanda plate of Dharmapāla*, which predated the
other two charters aforementioned, it is highly probable that Gopāla was not
born into any distinguished royal family and the Pāla foundation myth was set
up in the latter part of Dharmapāla’s reign. As Sanyal (2014, 174) argues, this
myth only became relevant “when he had to draw on legitimacy of his para-
mount status from his predecessor as he was aspiring to figure in the larger
power-axis of northern India.”

About a century later, the eulogists of the Kāmarūpa Pālas drew upon this
political rhetoric of the Bengal Pālas for asserting the dynasty's supposed his-
torical facts. The best example of this is the *praśasti* for Brahmapāla in the cop-
perplate charters issued by his son Ratnapāla. Having mentioned Śālastambha
— the founder of the previous dynasty of the region — as the supreme lord of
barbarians (*mlecchādhinātha*), who had taken the throne of Kāmarūpa in a state
of confusion,<fnref n="9" /> this *praśasti* explains how Brahmapāla, the predecessor of Ratna-
pāla, gained the royal seat.

When the twenty-first king of the line [of Śālastambha], named Tyāgasiṁha,
retired to heaven without an heir, his people, thinking that “a Bhauma
should be our lord once again,” made Brahmapāla, capable of shouldering

<footnote n="8">8 The Khalimpur plate of Dharmapāla, v. 4; the *Indian Museum plate of Dharmapāla*, year 26, v. 4: *mātsya-nyāyam apohitum prakṛtibhir lakṣmyāḥ karaṇ grāhitah śrī-gopāla iti kṣitīśa-śirasāṁ cūḍā-maṇis tat-sutah*. Here the rule of fishes (*mātsya-nyāya*) means political disorder or an-archical condition of the society. For further details of this concept in the political context of early medieval eastern India, see Pal (2008, 21–36).</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 Bargaon plate of Ratnapāla, v. 9; Śaratbāri plate of Ratnapāla, year 12, v. 9.</footnote>
and protecting the earth, [their] king, because he was a kinsman [of the Bhaumas].<fnref n="10" />

Here Bhauma means one belonging to the bhaumānvaya or the lineage of Bhūmi's son Naraka who was deemed the mythical progenitor of the first dynasty of Kāmarūpa known as the Varmans in the fifth to seventh centuries. But it is difficult to believe that Brahmapāla was actually a descendant of one of the members of the previous Varman family, because, in that case, his claim would have been expected to be more specific, as Sircar (2007, 141) points out.<fnref n="11" /> Rather, this praśasti was intended to give Brahmapāla credit for being eligible to be a new king, and the eligibility condition was drawn from his supposed connection with the first ruling family of the region. Intriguingly, the people who made him a new sovereign are represented as 'his people' (tat-prakṛtayo), that is to say, the local elites and administrative officials of Tyāgasiṁha, the last ruler of the second dynasty called the Mlecchas. This, along with the detailed reference to the Mleccha genealogy, does raise the possibility that Brahmapāla was one of the subordinates owing allegiance to the Mleccha ruler, but succeeded in taking possession of the throne after the demise of his overlord. Ratnapāla, who commissioned this praśasti, sought to borrow legitimacy from his father Brahmapāla by casting him as the ruler raised by the people, as Gopāla was deemed the people's chosen leader in the records of Dharmapāla. With self-conscious adaptation of the family name 'Pāla' from the Pālas of Bengal,<fnref n="12" /> Ratnapāla seems to have connected himself to a tradition that extended beyond the purely regional one. This concern was expressed in the poetical description of distant places and people, such as Śaka, Gurjjara (Gurjara-Pratihāra), Gauḍa, Kerala, Vāhika (Bāhīka of Punjab), Tāyika (Tājika, i.e. Arabs) and the Deccan, whose rulers had heard about the invincible city Durjayā of Kāmarūpa and feared its king Ratna-

<footnote n="10">10 Bargaon plate of Ratnapāla, v. 10; Śaratbāri plate of Ratnapāla, v. 10: nirvańśaṁ nṛpam ekaviṁśatitamaṁ śrī-tyāgasiṁhābhidhan| teṣām vīkṣya divaṁ gataṁ punar aho bhaumo hi no yujyate| svāmīti pravicintya tat-prakṛtayo bhū-bhāra-rakṣā-kṣamaṁ sāgandhyāt paricakrire narapati-śrī-brahmapālaṁ hi yaṁ||.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 Here the implication of the term sāgandhya is that Brahmapāla was not really a Bhauma, but he “smacked of one” and was thus acceptable in absence of the real thing. I would like to thank Dániel Balogh for pointing out the importance of this term.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">12 This developed further with new epithets in the following period. For instance, Harṣapāla (r. c. 1015–35) and Dharmapāla (1035–60) were described as “the light of the Pāla family” (pāla-kula-pradīpa) and “the sun to the lotus of the Pāla lineage” (pālānvayāmbuja-ravi). See the *Puspabhadra plate of Dharmapāla*, vv. 5, 8.</footnote>
pāla.<fnref n="13" /> That was obviously an exaggeration, yet it offered a new vision of trans-
regional political space.<fnref n="14" />

Like the rulers of both the Pālas of Bengal and Kāmarūpa, Śrīcandra, the con-
temporaneous Candra king, also used similar political idioms (with the word
prakṛti) for representing his predecessor. The praśasti for Suvarṇacandra
(r. c. 876-904), the grandfather of Śrīcandra, reads, "It [gold] was not purified in
fire, not put on a balance, but connected with heaviness by nature."<fnref n="15" /> The sub-
textual meaning embedded in this suggestive statement is that Suvarṇacandra
was neither born into the Agnikula (one of the distinguished Kṣatriya lineages)
nor performed tulāpuruṣa (the ritual weighing of a king against gold and its dis-
tribution among Brāhmaṇas), but was imbued with dignity by the prakṛti
(people). It is a subtle way of saying that Suvarṇacandra, the son of the Candra
progenitor Pūrṇacandra, was not a member of any dignified royal family but
earned the support of the people. This statement is, however, conspicuously ab-
sent from the new format of praśasti that was produced three years after the
Paschimbhag plate of Śrīcandra, year 5. The first example of the new format is the
Dhulla plate of Śrīcandra, issued around 933. Based on a distinct Buddhist narra-
tive associated with their lineage name Candra, the moon, the new praśasti re-
counts a different family history for Śrīcandra. His grandfather Suvarṇacandra
is thus recast as the son of Pūrṇacandra, the ruler of Rohitagiri, belonging to the
majestic lineage of the moon, and as a Buddhist born into the family of the moon
which devotedly carries in its curve the Buddha's hare birth story (buddhasya ...
śaśaka-jātakam)<fnref n="16" /> in the form of a mark. This change indicates that the narrative
framing of the Candras as a devout Buddhist family was made retrospectively,
that is<fnref n="17" /> eight years after Śrīcandra's accession to the throne. By connecting his

<footnote n="13">13 The *Bargaon plate of Ratnapāla*, ll. 34–36.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 For more details of how a new idea of kingship developed by the Bengal Pālas found an echo among the Kāmarūpa Pāla rulers, see Shin (2022a, 601-3).</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 The *Paschimbhag plate of Śrīcandra*, v. 3, and the *Kedarpur plate of Śrīcandra*, v. 3: nāgnau viśuddho na tulādhirūḍhaḥ kintu prakṛtyaiva yuto garimṇā.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 The Śaśajātaka (Cowell 1897, 34–37) was one of the representative stories exemplifying dānapāramitā (the Buddhist Perfection of Generosity), and was thus often depicted in Buddhist art and architecture since the third-fourth centuries CE. However, its presence in a royal eulogy was rare and its association with a royal lineage was rather unusual. The Candras’ conscious identity-making based on this Jātaka story should therefore be understood in the historical context of the time of Śrīcandra when they first claimed their lineage. For more details, see Shin (2022b, 1–8).</footnote>

<footnote n="17">17 See the *Dhulla plate of Śrīcandra*, vv. 2–3. This format continued till the end of Śrīcandra’s reign, as seen in the *Rampal plate of Śrīcandra*. vv. 2–3; the *Bogra plate of Śrīcandra*, vv. 2–3;</footnote>
lineage name Candra to the moon with the hare mark of the Jātaka story, Śrī-
candra could locate this rising political power within the ambit of the Buddhist
world of eastern India. Otherwise, he might have faced difficulty in legitimising
his rule due to the low status of his grandfather, even though the latter appears
to have gained the support of the people.

The conscious adaptation of the Bengal Pālas’ political idiom by both these
fast-rising rulers, Ratnapāla and Śrīcandra, to the eulogy of their predecessors
ran in parallel with their challenge to the former’s imperial authority. However,
valuable information about this challenge is not supplied by their own records
but by those of their successors. The *Gachtal plate of Gopāla* (r. c. 990–1015), a
great-grandson of Ratnapāla, refers to the victory of Ratnapāla precisely against
Gauḍarāja Rājyapāla, that is to say, Rājyapāla II (r. c. 932–969).

When he (Ratnapāla) with his two arms defeated Rājyapāla — the Gauḍa king
churlish on account of (the strength of) his arms — in (several) battles, he
transformed, so to speak, the Mandākinī (Gaṅgā, known to have clear water)
into the daughter of Kalinda (Yamunā, known for its dark water), thickening
its water with moonlike spots of ichor from his lordly elephants.<fnref n="18" />

Its vivid description of the Gaṅgā whose colour was changed by the ichor of
Ratnapāla's elephants may suggest the advance of his troops into the heart of
the Bengal Pāla territory. The absence of Kāmarūpa/Prāgjyotiṣa from the list of
groups and regions that submitted to Rājyapāla II implies Ratnapāla's success in
a feat against the imperial Pālas of Bengal, who had subdued the king of Prāg-
jyotiṣa about one hundred years earlier.<fnref n="19" />

<footnote>the *Bangladesh National Museum plate of Śrīcandra*, vv. 2-3; the *Madanapur plate of Śrīcandra*, vv. 2-3.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 The *Gachtal plate of Gopāla*, v. 15, ll. 28–29: *dor-darppa-durllaḍitam ājiṣu gauḍa-rājam yo rājyapālam avajitya bhuja-dvayena| manye gajendra-mada-candraka-sāndra-toyāṁ mandākinīm api kalinda-sutāñ cakāra||*.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 According to the *Bhaturiya stone inscription of Yaśodāsa* from the time of Rājyapāla II (v. 8), when Yaśodāsa was occupying the post of the *tantrādhikārin*, his master Rājyapāla II’s command was obeyed by the Mlecchas, Aṅgas, Kaliṅgas, Vaṅgas, Oḍras, Pāṇḍyas, Karṇātas, Lāṭas, Suhmas, Gurjaras, Krītas, and Cīnas. Though employing an utterly conventional expression, it gives a glimpse of groups of people who served Rājyapāla II and his sphere of influence. Kāmarūpa/Prāgjyotiṣa is conspicuous by its absence in the list. The subjugation of Kāmarūpa/Prāgjyotiṣa is mentioned only as the achievement of his great-great-grandfather Jayapāla, a cousin of Devapāla (r. c. 812–847), in the *Bharat Kala Bhavan plate of Rājyapāla, year 2*, v. 6, which merely repeats the *Bhagalpur plate of Nārāyaṇapāla*, v. 6, q.v. footnote 3. This indicates that the Pālas had lost their grip on the northeastern frontier by the mid-tenth century.</footnote>
Likewise, Śrīcandra’s success against the Bengal Pālas is also described in the records of his son and grandson, Kalyāṇacandra (r. c. 975–1000) and Laḍahacandra (r. c. 1000–1020). The *Dacca plate* of the former mentions that Śrīcandra installed Gopāla, i.e. Gopāla III (r. c. 969–975), as a king, and a plate of the latter speaks vaguely of Śrīcandra’s victory against a Gauḍa king.<fnref n="20" /> However, due to the conspicuous lack of any historico-referential information in the *Jajilpara plate of Gopāla III* from his 6th year, which is the only known copperplate charter of Gopāla III to date, it is difficult to assess Śrīcandra’s political impact on the Bengal Pālas accurately. The tenth verse of this record describing the victorious campaign of Gopāla III in the four cardinal directions (Misra and Majumdar 1951, 142) is nothing but the conventional *digvijaya* over the *cakravarti-kṣetra*, because it is also applied to Vigrahapāla II (r. c. 975–987) and Mahīpāla I (r. c. 987–1035).<fnref n="21" /> What is assumed is that during the second half of the tenth century, Pāla control over northern and western Bengal was increasingly contested by the rise of the Kāmbojas and the attack of the Candellas (Chowdhury 2018, 754–55). Śrīcandra seems to have intervened militarily in the political turmoil hitting the Pālas, and to have restored Gopāla III to the throne, probably in the last phase of his reign. The strongest contenders for the Pāla kingship at that time were probably the Kāmbojas, whose ruler even assumed the title *gauḍapati* or Lord of Gauḍa.<fnref n="22" /> This being the case, the Gauḍa king who is stated to have

<footnote n="20">20 The details of two copper plates of Kalyāṇacandra have yet to be published. Dani (1960, 41) and Sircar (1967–68, 299) give only a partial quotation from the *Dacca plate of Kalyāṇacandra*, according to which Śrīcandra was soft in removing the fears of other kings (or of a ruler named Pṛthvīpāla) and harsh in destroying Govarṇa, and he initiated rejoicing by installing Gopāla on the throne (*mahotsava-gurur gopāla-saṁropaṇe*). For the reference to Śrīcandra’s victory over a Gauḍa king whose name is not mentioned, see *Laḍahacandra’s first grant, year 6, v. 5*.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">21 It reads, “Whose war elephants, like clouds, having drunk clear water in the eastern country, which abounds with water, after that having roamed according to their own wills in the sandal forests of the valley of the Malaya [country], [and] having caused a coolness in the Maru lands by throwing dense sprays [of water emitted from their trunks], enjoyed the slopes of the Himālaya.” See the *Bangarh plate of Mahīpāla I, year 9, v. 11*.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">22 The *Dinajpur pillar inscription*, dated to the second half of the tenth century (also known as the Bangarh pillar inscription), records the erection of a temple of Śiva by a lord of Gauḍa belonging to the Kāmboja line (*kāmvojānvaya-jena gauḍa-patinā*). Chowdhury (2018, 813) conjectures on the basis of the Irda and Kalanda plates that Rājyapāla and his two sons, Nārāyaṇapāla and Nayapāla, who ruled over the southern portion of west Bengal in succession during the tenth century, belonged to the Kāmboja family. These plates call this Rājyapāla *kāmboja-varṇśa-tilaka*. In the stagnant period of Pāla history, they could spread their influence in northern and western Bengal, while Pāla dominion was possibly limited</footnote>
been defeated by Śrīcandra in Laḍahacandra's first grant may have been a Kāmboja ruler, even though we have only limited evidence on Kāmboja presence in the heart of the Pāla territory of north Bengal.

However, the question that should be asked here is not whether this political scenario is true, but why the reference to military or political success of the two neighbouring rulers — Ratnapāla and Śrīcandra — against the imperial Pālas took on its particular significance between the late tenth and the beginning of the eleventh centuries, that is to say, during the reign of Mahīpāla I (r. c. 987–1035) of Bengal. Another pertinent question is how the aspirations of the Kāmarūpa and Candra rulers changed at that time. To answer these, it is important to remember that, in his four grants, Mahīpāla I is credited with having obtained his father’s kingdom or the kingship of his paternal kingdom, which had been snatched away by unentitled people.<fnref n="23" /> The enemies who dispossessed Mahīpāla I of his paternal kingdom are identified with the Kāmbojas, and the area which he retrieved is considered to be Varendra or northern Bengal (Sircar 1951–52, 3; Chowdhury 2018, 760). The first appearance of this verse in the *Belwa plate*, dated to the second regnal year of Mahīpāla I,<fnref n="24" /> attests to his success against his enemies in the very early part of his reign, and its repeated occurrence in several other land grants, such as the *Amgachi plate of Vigrahapāla III* (r. c. 1050–1076) and the *Manahali plate of Madanapāla* (r. c. 1144/45–1165), shows the importance of his achievement. Mahīpāla I reestablished Pāla authority over northern Bengal and some part of western Bengal, and held sway over southern Bihar. Towards the close of his reign, he succeeded in ensuring Pāla control over northern Bihar. The absence of any serious trouble from outside, except for Rājendra Cola’s invasion in 1021, helped him to consolidate Pāla power in eastern India (Chowdhury 2018, 766).

Such were the political circumstances confronting both the Kāmarūpa Pāla and the Candra rulers between the late tenth and the beginning of the eleventh centuries. Unlike Ratnapāla and Śrīcandra, who had taken advantage of the political turmoil and military stagnancy of the Bengal Pālas to expand their

<footnote>to Aṅga and Magadha. It was against this backdrop that the Kāmboja rulers adopted names identical to those of the Bengal Pāla kings and one of their consorts. They modelled their genealogy on the Pāla one. This is another example of the political adoption of the Pāla idioms by neighbouring lesser powers in eastern India.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23 anadhikṛta-viluptaṁ rājyam āsādya pitryam, in the *Belwa plate of Mahīpāla I, year 2*, v. 11; the *Rangpur plate of Mahīpāla I, year 5*, v. 12; the *Dinajpur plate of Mahīpāla I, year 9*, v. 12; the *Biyala plate of Mahīpāla I*, v. 11.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">24 As to the date of the *Belwa plate*, I adopt the modified date of year 2 suggested by Furui (2011a, 242 n. 4), based on his reading from a digital photograph.</footnote>
activities far beyond their respective core regions in the first half of the tenth century, the descendants of both the rulers saw the Pālas recovering from their political instability. It was, therefore, not wholly a coincidence that a heroic vision of their dynasties' past was cherished by both the Kāmarūpa Pāla and Candra rulers during the long-term stable reign of Mahīpāla I, when they could not make actual military expeditions into the Bengal region. In this vision of the past, the success of Ratnapāla and Śrīcandra against the Bengal Pālas was represented as a political event that was worthy of being remembered with historical accuracy. The plates of Gopāla and Kalyāṇacandra, both referring to specific Bengal Pāla sovereigns by name, demonstrate a keen awareness of their forefathers' opponents.<fnref n="25" /> Though this specificity gives way to the vague expression of "a Gauḍa king" in the grants issued by Laḍahacandra (r. c. 1000–1020) and Govindacandra (r. c. 1020–1045) in the last phase of the Candra dynasty, their forefather's victory against the imperial Pālas remained a political event to be cherished and valued. Such historical retrospection certainly involved political overtones in the reign of Mahīpāla I who reconsolidated the Pālas' hold on power in eastern India.

In sum, the array of Kāmarūpa Pāla and Candra epigraphic records bears witness to the self-images of kingship those rulers sought to project under changing political circumstances. At a time of their ascendency, the first half of the tenth century, the Kāmarūpa Pāla and Candra rulers drew upon the political idiom of the Bengal Pālas to compensate for their obscure origin and establish their image as successors of kings chosen by the people. However, when the Pālas of Bengal reassumed their sway over much of eastern India from the late tenth century, they rather emphasised the facticity of past military action or political intervention over some previous Pāla kings of Bengal. As a point of reference, the Pālas were used continuously in making the consummate self-images of their contenders, and in doing so, the Pāla sphere of influence in representational practices actually expanded when this strongest polity of eastern India became an empire in decline.

<footnote n="25">25 For the *Gachtal plate of Gopāla* mentioning Ratnapāla's victory against Rājyapāla (i.e. Rājyapāla II), see footnote 18. For the *Dacca plate of Kalyāṇacandra* referring to Śrīcandra's restoration of Gopāla (i.e. Gopāla III), see footnote 20.</footnote>
### 3. Presentation of others in a changing religious landscape

The two neighbouring powers contending against Pāla authority were unlikely to ally themselves to each other, due to the Candras' several attempts to take over Kāmarūpa.<fnref n="26" /> The first one was made by Śrīcandra, who led further military expeditions into the northeastern corner of the subcontinent, following his father Trailokyacandra's subjugation of Samataṭa. The *Paschimbhag plate of Śrīcandra*, year 5, the earliest known charter of this king, gives an account of his military campaign against Kāmarūpa.

His soldiers at the (time of the) conquest of Kāmarūpa, it is said, lingered in the woody regions of the Lohitya river darkened by black aloe trees, with its flocks of pigeons taking wing, monkeys roaming about bowers of plantain trees yellow with ripening fruit, and the eaves (of the forest) frequented by yaks falling asleep in the lethargy of their rumination. “This is Citraśilā, the Painted Rock, bedecked in a delightful efflorescence of rock tar! This is the river Puṣpabhadrā whose banks rustle with the fair leaves of palmyra trees!” — such [verses] were recited eagerly and at length by the scholars of his army in a lesson at the time of the conquest of the Northern Region, after attending to the deities of the locality on the Snow Mountain.<fnref n="27" />

This interesting account seems to contain an admixture of actual observation and literary convention: the former is evident in the specific names of a rock and a river found in Kāmarūpa, whereas the latter is noticeable in the stereotypical description of Kāmarūpa's flora and fauna and its location of being assigned to the Northern Region (*uttarāpatha*), just as in Kālidāsa's *Raghuvaṁśa*, which refers to this place as the last country to be subdued by Raghu's northern expedition.<fnref n="28" /> While showing great concern for the space, both experienced and

<footnote n="26">26 Kāmarūpa was much coveted by the rulers of Gauḍa and Vaṅga because of its resources, including the areca nuts, betel leaves, aloe wood, silk cotton trees, and gold from the aluvial deposits of the Brahmaputra, and its location on the important horse trade route. For more details, see Ghosh (2010–11, 116–17).</footnote>

<footnote n="27">27 The *Paschimbhag plate of Śrīcandra*, year 5, vv. 12–13: *yat-sainyaiḥ kila kāmarūpa-vijaye rohat-kapotī-ghanā nirvviṣṭāḥ phala-pāka-piṅga-kadalī-kuñja-bhramad-vānarāḥ| romanthālasa-vaddha-nidra-camarī-saṁsevita-prāntarā lohityasya vana-sthalī-parisarāḥ kālāguru-śyāmalāḥ|| saiṣā citraśilā manorama-śilā-puṣpa-pratānācitā tālī-sacchada-marmmaraiḥ parisaraiḥ sā puṣpa-bhadrā nadī| ity utkaṇṭhulam uttarāpatha-jaye yat-sainika-śrotriyair adhyāye paṭhitāś ciraṁ himagirau dṛṣṭvā sthalī-devatāḥ||.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">28 *Raghuvaṁśa* 4. 81–84. The northern region called *udīcya* or *uttarāpatha* comprises the region between the eastern Punjab and the Oxus in the northwest as well as the entire Himālayan region.</footnote>
imagined, this earliest Candra record of Kāmarūpa pays less attention to the his-
torical event itself. What is noticeable is the Candra soldiers' eagerness to con-
quer Kāmarūpa, as seen in verse 13 of the record. The mention of the
Puśpabhadrā river, which has been identified with a small stream to the north
of the Brahmaputra near Guwahati (M. M. Sharma 1978, 255), suggests that the
Candra military expedition penetrated the area around Durjayā, Kāmarūpa's
then political centre. However, the account mentions neither the name of Śrī-
candra's adversary nor the extent of his success.<fnref n="29" /> The Kāmarūpa Pāla armies
also do not figure in this account. Śrīcandra's direct control appears to have ex-
tended to Sylhet, as the land donation was made in Śrīhaṭṭa maṇḍala, but his
subjugation of Kāmarūpa remains uncertain. Given the complete silence on this
expedition in his seven other records, Śrīcandra's raid was probably short-lived
and the effects of Candra presence were restricted to only a small portion of
Kāmarūpa.

About five decades later, Śrīcandra’s son Kalyāṇacandra (r. c. 975–1000) led another military campaign against Kāmarūpa whose then ruler was Indrapāla (r. c. 960–990). A generation after this invasion, the *Gachtal plate of Gopāla* (r. c. 990–1015), Indrapāla’s son, gives a direct reference to their clash and Kalyāṇacandra’s defeat by Indrapāla in a naval war.

Strong Kalyāṇacandra, Śrīcandra’s son, the king of Vaṅga, he of the invinci-
ble arms [demonstrated] in his clash with the frenzied Gauḍas, was himself
overtaken (by the army of Indrapāla) at the border of the battlefield. De-
feated by him (Indrapāla), he slunk miserably away to somewhere, abandon-
ing with fearful mind his fleet of boats beautifully festooned with fluttering
golden medallions as well as his glory.<fnref n="30" />

What makes the reference noteworthy is the way it portrays Kalyāṇacandra. He
is credited with having demolished the frenzied Gauḍas with his undefeatable
arms. Here the expression, “the frenzied Gauḍas” (*mādyad-gauḍa*) alludes to the

<footnote n="29">29 Dani (1966, 34), on the other hand, on the basis of his revised reading of the *Dacca plate of Kalyāṇacandra*, suggests that the Kāmarūpa ruler who was defeated by Śrīcandra was Ratnapāla. His new reading sounds plausible since both the rulers were contemporaries. However, Śrīcandra’s victory over Ratnapāla was very unlikely to lead to the annexation of Kāmarūpa. For more details, see Islam (2018, 622).</footnote>

<footnote n="30">30 The *Gachtal plate of Gopāla*, v. 20, ll. 36–38: *mādyad-gauḍa-vimardda-durddama-bhujah śrīcandra-sūnuḥ svayaṁ prāptaḥ saṁgara-sīmni vaṅga-nrpatiḥ kalyāṇacandro vali| cañcat-kāñcana-cakra-cāru-racitaṁ nau-cakram uttrasta-dhīs tyaktvā yad-vijitaḥ sahaiva yaśasā dīnaḥ pralinaḥ kvacit||.</footnote>
Pālas of Bengal renowned for their war elephants rutting in battlefields.<fnref n="31" /> The portrayal of Kalyāṇacandra as the vanquisher of the Gauḍa army indirectly inflates Indrapāla’s superiority, because this Kāmarūpa ruler becomes the annihilator of the Candra king. By accentuating the military achievement of their adversary, the Kāmarūpa Pālas could successfully cast themselves as the strongest power in eastern India.

In contrast, the records of Kalyāṇacandra’s successors, Laḍahacandra (r. c. 1000–1020) and Govindacandra (r. c. 1020–1045), refer to Kalyāṇacandra’s triumph in Kāmarūpa in a very metaphorical way: “he caused shedding of big tears in the eyes of the *mleccha* women”<fnref n="32" /> and “he made double the waters of the Lohitya river by means of the tears from the eyes of the *mleccha* women, which had been caused by him through killing their husbands.”<fnref n="33" /> We cannot in actual fact be certain about the result of their clash, since both dynasties claimed to be the victor. Nevertheless, the fact that the Candra accounts make no direct reference to the war itself throws doubt on their claims. Considering the difficult mountainous terrain and overflowing rivers in Kāmarūpa, which gave all Bengal armies including the Bengal Sultans and Mughals in the later period little chance of success, Kalyāṇacandra may also have faced the hard reality of ultimate defeat. It is therefore understandable why the later Candra records are eager to project a successful image of Kalyāṇacandra with such a conventional poetic expression.

Support for this supposition also comes from the term *mleccha*, which is applied to describe the people of Kāmarūpa. Scholars including Sircar (1973, 49) have been quite explicit that the *mlecchas* figured in later Candra records mean the second ruling family of Kāmarūpa known as the Mleccha dynasty. However, this is very unlikely to be the case in view of two facts: first, the period of Kalyāṇacandra’s campaign simply did not match up with that of the Mleccha rule which flourished in the eighth-ninth centuries in the mid-Brahmaputra valley with present Tezpur of Assam as its political centre; and second, a dynamic name is not a common feature of presenting others in the epigraphic practice of early medieval eastern India, which almost always uses a name of a region in referring to another political power, such as Gauḍa, Vaṅga, Samataṭa, Harikela and so on. The Candra records, too, use Kāmarūpa or Prāgjyotiṣa to denote both

<footnote n="31">31 For the abundance of elephants in the Pāla army described in an Arab account of the ninth century, see Ahmad (1989, 43–44).</footnote>

<footnote n="32">32 *Laḍahacandra’s first grant*, v. 8a: *mlecchīnān nayaneṣu yena janitaḥ sthūlāśru-kośa-vyayo*.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">33 *Govindacandra’s grant*, year 6, v. 7: *yenāsau dviguṇikṛtaḥ pati-vadhād udvejitānām ghanair mlecchīnān nayanāmbubhir vigalitair lohitya-nāmā nadaḥ*.</footnote>
the polity and the people of the northeastern region at the beginning of the
tenth century.

If so, how do we explain the appearance of this new nomenclature, *mleccha*,
in the eleventh-century Candra charters? To answer this question, we must first
recognise that it arose in the context of increasing Brahmanical influence on
the last two Candra rulers: Laḍahacandra and Govindacandra. Though both con-
tinued to use the Buddhist symbol of the *dharmacakra* as the emblem on their
seal and the Buddhist epithet *parama-saugata* as one of their titles, their dona-
tions were neither made in the name of the lord Buddha, nor contained any
other Buddhist elements. On the contrary, Laḍahacandra granted lands in the
name of Viṣṇu, a form of whom was even named after himself, and Govinda-
candra did the same in the name of Śiva, to whose son Mahāsena he was consid-
ered to be equal.<fnref n="34" /> Laḍahacandra was a Vaiṣṇava and Govindacandra had obvi-
ous Śaiva leanings. The Candras' self-image was also redesigned in accordance
with the new genealogical claim tracing their descent from the moon god
Candra, the light sprung from the sage Atri's eye (*atri-netra*).<fnref n="35" /> This claim cer-
tainly drew on the origin myth of the Candravamśa well known in Epic-Purāṇic
traditions.<fnref n="36" /> Given a long absence of Kṣatriya identity-making based on the

<footnote n="34">34 The two charters of Laḍahacandra record grants of land in the name of Vāsudeva-bhaṭṭāraka (the lord Vāsudeva, i.e. Viṣṇu) in favour of Laḍahamādhava-bhaṭṭāraka (the lord Laḍahamādhava) installed by the king. See *Laḍahacandra’s first grant*, ll. 53–54; *Laḍahacandra’s second grant*, ll. 20–21. As Mādhava is a well-known name of the god Viṣṇu, Laḍahamādhava was undoubtedly a form of Viṣṇu named after the king Laḍahacandra himself. His strong attachment to the Brahmanical creed is also attested in his pilgrimage to Vārāṇasī and Prayāga, where he made an offering to his ancestors and offered gifts of gold to numerous Brāhmaṇas. See *Laḍahacandra’s first grant*, vv. 16–18. *Govindacandra’s grant*, on the other hand, records a donation which has been made in favour of the dancing form of Śiva called Naṭṭeśvara-bhaṭṭāraka, in the name of Śiva-bhaṭṭāraka (the lord Śiva). It also refers to this king as an equal to Mahāsena (i.e. Skanda, Kārttikeya), and his parents to the latter’s parents, Śiva and Śivā. See *Govindacandra’s grant*, ll. 46–47, v. 13. Despite its beginning with a prayer to Buddha, Dharma, and Saṅgha, Govindacandra’s charter concludes the record of donation with a prayer to the gods Svayambhū, Hari, and Hara. See *Govindacandra’s grant*, v. 16.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">35 *Laḍahacandra’s first grant*, v. 1; *Govindacandra’s grant*, v. 2.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">36 As one of the seven great sages who were all born from the god Brahmā's mind, Atri figured prominently in the Vedic-Epic-Purāṇic corpus. He was married to Anasūyā Devī and had three sons, namely, Dattātreya, Durvāsas, and Candra. The *Bhāgavatapurāṇa* 9.14.1–9.24.67 tells us that the god Brahmā had a son called Atri, and the latter had a son called Soma (i.e. Candra), who was born out of his tears of joy. Soma had a son, Budha (i.e. Mercury), by his spouse Tārā, and Budha had one offspring, Purūravas, by his consort Ilā. It</footnote>
Lunar/Solar lineages in eastern epigraphic records, the Candras' conscious attempt to link themselves to the prestigious Candravamśa is even more noteworthy.

Seen in this context, the emergence of the Candras' Kṣatriya consciousness and the rise of their contemptuous attitudes towards the neighbouring Kāmarūpa people were processes which unfolded simultaneously over the first half of the eleventh century. This simultaneity suggests that boosting their self-image was bound up with demeaning the image of others. Often translated as 'barbarian,' the term *mleccha* used to refer not only to aliens from outside of the subcontinent, but to tribes who were not part of the agrarian *varṇa* society of Indic civilisation. In general, these groups were recognised as perpetual outsiders and potential contesters of Brahmanical norms and, therefore, often mentioned in unfavourable terms in Sanskrit literature (Talbot 1995, 698; Parasher-Sen 2006, 435). Labelling the Kāmarūpa people as *mlecchas* may have been instrumental to the primary goal of providing the Candra rulers with a self-image as the upholder of law and society. A strong tribal substratum, which left the northeastern region with much less Brahmanical influence than its neighbours, was another important factor in accentuating the otherness of the Kāmarūpa people. What is also noteworthy is that the term *mleccha* is never applied to the people of Gauḍa, the nuclear area of the Bengal Pālas, though they were also the Candras' adversaries.<fnref n="37" />

However, we should not take that as an indication of a regionalist view. In Kāmarūpa too, rulers similarly employed the Brahmanical concept of *mleccha* for political rivals within their region, as it was one of the most resonant images of the other. For instance, the first known charter of the Kāmarūpa Pālas refers to the founder of the previous dynasty with discernible disdain as the supreme lord of barbarians (*mlecchādhinātha*).<fnref n="38" /> Though not in epigraphic records, the negative image of the Kirātas, a local tribe vanquished by Naraka, the son of the Varāha incarnation of Viṣṇu, is well reflected in the *Kālikāpurāṇa* of the first half of the eleventh century, probably composed during the reign of Dharmapāla of the Kāmarūpa Pālas. Here the Kirātas embody the Brahmanical notion of the tribal other, devoid of culture and civilisation. Naraka's victory against this

then gives us a long list of the descendants of Purūravas, all of whom comprised the renowned Lunar Dynasty called Candravamśa/Somavamśa. For further details of changing genealogical claims of the Candras, see Shin (2022b, 1–8).

<footnote n="37">37 For instance, the later Candra plates proclaim Kalyāṇacandra’s great victory over the people of Gauḍa or Gauḍa king, but they never use the term *mleccha* in this context. See *Laḍahacandra’s first grant*, v. 8; *Govindacandra’s grant*, v. 7.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">38 The *Bargaon plate of Ratnapāla*, v. 9; the *Śaratbāri plate of Ratnapāla*, v. 9.</footnote>
"strong, cruel and foolish people" is deemed a preamble to a Brahmanical kingdom in Kāmarūpa, renowned for its sages, Vedic studies, and practice of varṇa order and dāna (Kālikāpurāṇa 38.101, 128-130). It is noteworthy that the Kāmarūpa Pālas, being discounted as mlecchas by the Candras, in turn discounted their local people as the typical tribal other. The new royal epithet śrī-vārāha, the one born in the family of illustrious Varāha, was used in a figurative way to represent the Kāmarūpa Pāla kings' descent from Naraka, emphasising their Vaiṣṇava patrimony (Shin 2022a, 583-617). The considerable importance attached to this epithet in the time of Gopāla (r. c. 990-1015) and Dharmapāla (r. c. 1035-1060) suggests that the making of a Brahmanical vision of kingship in contrast to the barbarian other was not limited only to the eleventh-century Candras.

Behind this development of a new type of representation worked deeper political, social, and religious changes in eastern India. First, the strong grip of Mahīpāla I (r. c. 987-1035) and Nayapāla (r. c. 1036-1051) on Bengal probably curbed the military activity of both the later Candra and Kāmarūpa kings (Islam 2018, 628). This is clear from the complete absence of verses praising the military achievement of Laḍahacandra and Govindacandra in their charters, and also from the very poetical exaggeration of Dharmapāla's valour in his praśasti. When they did not or could not have any martial accomplishment to celebrate and commemorate, their self-promotion was made either at the expense of others or on the basis of an inflated genealogical claim, or sometimes both. In this context, Vaiṣṇavism with its Brahmanical orthodoxy proved attractive to both the Candra and Kāmarūpa Pāla rulers. A clear shift in the religious affiliation of Laḍahacandra and Dharmapāla towards Vaiṣṇava faith at the personal level contributed to reinventing their images as an embodiment or a descendant of the god who ruled the cosmos and the world by taking on many different forms.<fnref n="39" />

Migrant Brāhmaṇas, hailing from north Bengal and induced to settle in Vaṅga and Kāmarūpa by land grants, probably played an important role in the creation of a “Vaiṣṇava” lordship of both the rulers. The installation of Laḍahamādhava, Viṣṇu named after Laḍahacandra, may have been induced by the Brāhmaṇas from north Bengal where the prevalence of the same habit is

<footnote n="39">39 The two charters of Laḍahacandra begin with an invocation to Vāsudeva: oṁ namo bhagavate vāsudevāya. See Laḍahacandra’s first grant, v. 1; Laḍahacandra’s second grant, year 6, v. 1. The last charter of Dharmapāla of Kāmarūpa also begins with a salutation to Viṣṇu in his Varāha form: svasti śrīmān sa kroḍa-rūpo jayati. See the Puspabhadra plate of Dharmapāla, v. 1.</footnote>
attested by several pieces of epigraphic evidence.<fnref n="40" /> The worship of Laḍaha-
mādhava at Paṭṭikeraka, established by Laḍahacandra, remained as a symbol of
royal authority till the late thirteenth century, as the *Grant of Vīradharadeva* at-
tests.<fnref n="41" /> In the case of Kāmarūpa, it is evident that Brāhmaṇas with a Vaiṣṇava
orientation migrated from north Bengal to the region upon the direct interven-
tion of Dharmapāla, who donated the largest plot of land to a Brāhmaṇa in over
two hundred years of Pāla history.<fnref n="42" /> The last, but not least, point concerns the
close ties between this religious change and self-projection: the singular devo-
tion to Viṣṇu was developed in parallel with overt emphasis on the Kṣatriya
origin of both the Candra and Kāmarūpa Pāla rulers, and this lineage-based self-
representation was followed by new dynasties including the Varmans
(r. c. 1050–1125) ruling southeastern Bengal, and another Candra line
(r. c. 1120–1200) holding sway over the lower Brahmaputra valley in the twelfth
century.<fnref n="43" /> The rulers of India’s easternmost region finally fell within the ambit
of the early medieval convention of making Kṣatriya identity, which, in con-
trast, was never attempted by the imperial Pālas till the end of their days. The
two lesser powers were more adaptive and responsive to new modes of political
representation. Those modes were followed by the Senas, who eventually over-
powered the imperial Pālas.

<footnote n="40">40 According to Furui (2013, 397), a number of Viṣṇu images are inscribed with names ending with his epithets like Mādhava and Nārāyaṇa, which are prefixed with male or female personal names. For instance, a form of Viṣṇu called Sonnakādevī-Mādhava was named after a woman called Sonnakā or Sonnakādevī. For the presence of Brāhmaṇas hailing from north Bengal in the Candra kingdom, see Fleming (2010, 225).</footnote>

<footnote n="41">41 The *Grant of Vīradharadeva* of the later Devas was made in favour of the lord Vāsudeva named Laḍahamādhava. For palaeographic reasons, his plate is assigned to the thirteenth century by S. C. Bhattacharya (1983, 20, 23).</footnote>

<footnote n="42">42 For instance, Madhusūdana, a Brāhmaṇa donee attached to the worship of Mādhava from his boyhood, is said to have originated from a village called Khyātipali, an abode of pious and learned Brāhmaṇas as well as a place of sacrifice and Vedic study, probably situated in Varendra of Bengal. Madhusūdana was the only Brāhmaṇa who was granted land yielding as much as 10 000 (*droṇas* of) paddies during the rule of the Pālas. See the *Puspabhadra plate of Dharmapāla*, v. 18; vv. 9–11; v. 21. For more details, see Shin (2022a, 605).</footnote>

<footnote n="43">43 The Vaiṣṇava Varmans traced their origin from Yadu and claimed their status as the kinsmen of Hari (Kṛṣṇa). See the *Belava plate of Bhojavarman*, vv. 1-4. The Candras, whose character begins with a salutation to the lord Vāsudeva and invokes Varāha-Viṣṇu, also claimed Candravaṁśa origin. See the *Assam plates of Vallabhadeva*, vv. 1-3.</footnote>
4. Conclusion

In this article, I have argued that the epigraphic representation of self and oth-
ers should be viewed as contextual articulation. Only through understanding
the changing context of politics, society, culture, and religion can one account
for the diversity in the representational practices of the Pālas of Kāmarūpa and
the Candras of Vaṅga, the two lesser powers flourishing on the edge of the Pāla
empire of Bengal in a transitional phase.

First, their self-image as leaders chosen by the people appeared at the time
of their ascendency, the first half of the tenth century, when the Kāmarūpa Pāla
and Candra rulers consciously adopted the political idiom of the Bengal Pālas to
disguise their obscure origin and to secure legitimacy. However, when the Pālas
reassumed their sway over much of eastern India from the late tenth century, a
heroic vision of the past surfaced in the two dynasties' records, with detailed
references to their military action or political intervention directed at earlier
Pāla kings. As a point of reference, the Pālas were used continuously in making
the consummate self-images of their contenders, and in doing so, the Pāla
sphere of influence in representational practices expanded even as this strong-
est polity of eastern India became an empire in decline. Second, while repre-
senting themselves in relation with the imperial Pālas, the two powers defined
their political rivals as *mleccha*, clearly connoting a lack of culture and civilisa-
tion. By the first half of the eleventh century, the Candras applied this term to
the Kāmarūpa Pālas, and the latter did the same to the previous dynasty of their
region, which had arisen from local tribal people. Their contemptuous attitudes
towards others, whether within or outside a region, coincided with their grow-
ing consciousness of the Vaiṣṇava divine kingship and Kṣatriya genealogical
claim, in which migrant Brāhmaṇas from north Bengal played an increasingly
important role. This pejorative characterisation of the others was, therefore, a
by-product of the process of their identity formation, and in the course of which
the other was always defined in an uneven power relation.

Located on the periphery of the imperial Pāla heartland, the two lesser pow-
ers constructed their image through a twofold process: adapting political idioms
and religious attributes from north Bengal on the one hand, and distancing
themselves from others, whose deficiency in Brahmanical norms is highlighted,
on the other. Self-representation and the presentation of others were not ef-
fected in isolation: they were reflective and reciprocative.
## 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.

* Amgachi plate of Vigrahapāla III: Banerji (1919–20).

* Assam plates of Vallabhadeva: Sharma (1978 № 22).

* Badal pillar inscription: Kielhorn (1894).

* Bangarh plate of Mahīpāla I, year 9: Banerji (1917–18).

* Bangladesh National Museum plate of Śrīcandra: Mills (1993).

* Bargaon plate of Ratnapāla: Sharma (1978 № 13).

* Belava plate of Bhojavarman: Basak (1913–14a).

* Belwa plate of Mahīpāla I, year 2: Sircar (1951–52 № A).<fnref n="44" />

* Bhagalpur plate of Nārāyaṇapāla, year 17: Bengal Charters 00091.

* Bhāgavatapurāṇa: Tagare (1950).

* Bharat Kala Bhavan plate of Rājyapāla, year 2: Furui (2016).

* Bhaturiya stone inscription of Yaśodāsa: Sircar (1959–60a).

* Biyala plate of Mahīpāla I: Furui (2010, 104).

* Bogra plate of Śrīcandra: Fleming (2010).

* Dacca plate of Kalyāṇacandra: partial citations in Dani (1960, 41) and Sircar (1967–68, 299).

* Dhulla plate of Śrīcandra: Sircar (1959–60b).

* Dinajpur pillar inscription: Chanda (1911).

* Dinajpur plate of Mahīpāla I, year 9: Kielhorn (1892c).

* Gachtal plate of Gopāla: Sharma (1978 № 17); Sircar (1973–74 № 3).<fnref n="45" />

* Gaya temple inscription of Nārāyaṇapāla, year 7: Sircar (1963–64 № 1).

* Govindacandra's grant, year 6: Sircar (1969–70 № 3).

* Grant of Vīradharadeva: S. C. Bhattacharya (1983).

* Indian Museum image inscription of Nārāyaṇapāla, year 9: Banerji (1915, 62 Pl. 31).

* Indian Museum plate of Dharmapāla, year 26: Furui (2011b).

* Jagajjibanpur plate of Mahendrapāla, year 7: Bengal Charters 00073.

* Jajilpara plate of Gopāla III, year 6: Misra and Majumdar (1951).

* Kālikāpurāṇa: Shastri (1991–92).

* Kedarpur plate of Śrīcandra: Bhattasali (1923–24).

* Khalimpur plate of Dharmapāla: Kielhorn (1896–97a).

* Laḍahacandra's first grant, year 6: Sircar (1969–70 № 1).

* Laḍahacandra's second grant, year 6: Sircar (1969–70 № 2).

* Madanapur plate of Śrīcandra: Basak (1949–50).

<footnote n="44">44 Sircar's reading of year 5 has been revised on the basis of Furui (2011a, 242 n. 4).</footnote>

<footnote n="45">45 Revised by Ryosuke Furui from digital photographs taken by him at the Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies, Assam, in 2016.</footnote>
*Manahali plate of Madanapāla*: Vasu (1900).

*Mirzapur plate of Śūrapāla I, year 3*: BengalCharters00107.

*Nalanda plate of Dharmapāla*: BengalCharters00095.

*Paschimbhag plate of Śrīcandra, year 5*: BengalCharters00008; Sircar (1967–68).

*Puspabhadra plate of Dharmapāla*: Sharma (1978 № 20).

*Raghuvamśa*: Devadhar (1985).

*Rampal plate of Śrīcandra*: Basak (1913–14b).

*Rangpur plate of Mahīpāla I, year 5*: Furui (2011a).

*Śaratbāri plate of Ratnapāla, year 12*: Sircar (1973–74 № 2).
# The Portrayal of Underlings in Eastern Cālukya Copper Plates

Dániel Balogh

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

## 1. Introduction

As is now widely recognised and also set out in the introduction of this book, inscriptions in general and copperplate *praśastis* in particular have much to tell the historian beyond the names and dates recorded in them. What I wish to explore here is an aspect of the perceptual world into which these inscriptions provide a glimpse, namely, the public personae of rulers and underlings and the way these are articulated by the texts under study. Epigraphically based historical studies often fall into one of two broad kinds, either adopting a bird's eye view of a massive (and vaguely defined) corpus to point out large-scale historical trends and patterns, or embracing a hermeneutical close reading of a single inscription or a very small corpus and generalising from the insights gained thereby. This article reports an attempt to apply an intermediate perspective, and to ground the study of representation in inscriptional *praśastis* more solidly in the texts themselves than afforded by either of the above approaches. My intention is to explore how these texts characterise public personages and what the underlying key themes of such characterisations might be, and to look (synchronically) for patterns and (diachronically) for historical trends in these themes. My subject matter consists specifically of the copperplate grants of the Eastern Cālukya dynasty, which I have spent the last few years re-editing for the DHARMA project; and to accomplish my aim, I have borrowed textual analysis methodology from the social sciences.

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.
<figure><img src="image_14.png" /><figcaption>Figure 1. The lineage of Eastern Cālukya kings</figcaption></figure>
## 1.1. Eastern Cālukya dynastic history

The establishment of the Eastern Cālukya dynasty was a consequence of the Bādāmi Calukya<fnref n="1" /> Pulakeśin II's conquest of the Godavari delta and coastal Andhra in the second decade of the seventh century.<fnref n="2" /> In circumstances that are not very well understood but probably included a relative political vacuum left behind by the waning of Visṇukuṇḍi power (Sankaranarayanan 1977, 89–90), Pulakeśin's younger brother took control of the conquered territory and eventually established himself as an independent ruler by the name Kubja-Visṇuvardhana or Visṇuvardhana I. The pedigree of the male scions of the dynasty is illustrated in Figure 1, where numbers preceding names indicate the order of succession to the throne, and numbers below the names are reign periods given in the Common Era; people without a number did not ascend to the throne.

Over a century later (in 753), the Rāṣṭrakūṭas rose to overthrow the Bādāmi Calukya line, and began to harass the Andhra country by 769.<fnref n="3" /> An uneasy balance of power — with the Rāṣṭrakūṭas mostly having the upper hand — seems to have been achieved, consolidated through repeated marriage alliances, and maintained for nearly two centuries before the situation escalated. In the ninth century, the Eastern Cālukya king Vijayāditya II Narendramṛgarāja (r. c. 808–847) briefly lost his throne to his half-brother Bhīma-Sa{uke, a puppet set up by the Rāṣṭrakūṭa Govinda III. Vijayāditya II reasserted himself with great vigour when Amoghavarṣa I (r. 814–878) ascended to the Rāṣṭrakūṭa throne as a child, but probably had to submit to Amoghavarṣa later on. Vijayāditya II's grandson Vijayāditya III Guṇaga (r. c. 849–892) apparently spent part of his career conducting independent campaigns, part warring against Amoghavarṣa, and another part as Amoghavarṣa's ally; then after the latter's death turned the tables

<footnote n="1">1 I adopt Annette Schmiedchen's use of Calukya for the Bādāmi (Vātāpi) line (see note 2 on p. 190) and Cālukya for the offshoot dynasties. In fact, the Eastern Cālukyas use a short *a* (and generally a retroflex *l*) in their earlier grants, and long *ā* (and dental *l*) in the later ones. In translations from primary texts, I follow the spelling of the original. While I employ the terms "Eastern Cālukya" and "Veṅgī Cālukya" interchangeably, I prefer not to distinguish the primary Bādāmi dynasty with the label "Western," since this latter can also refer to the later (and uncertainly related) Cālukya line of Kalyāṇa.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">2 See Fleet (1891b, 94–95), Krishna Rao (1973, 78–84) and Sankaranarayanan (1977, 110–15) for slightly varying accounts of the dynasty's founding and for the relevant primary sources.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">3 The following crash course in Eastern Cālukya history draws on the summaries of Nilakanta Sastri and Venkataramanayya (1960) and Sircar (1955, 132–39), and the in-depth treatment by Krishna Rao (1973, 160–404). All of these accounts are speculative as regards many details, but the broad outlines I present here are securely established.</footnote>
and forced Kṛṣṇa II (r. 878–914) into submission. Kṛṣṇa in turn eventually de-
feated and captured Vijayāditya III’s nephew and heir Bhīma I (r. 892–921),<fnref n="4" /> and
orchestrated a successful invasion of Veṅgī territory.

The manner of Bhīma’s return to Veṅgī and power is unknown, but the
Rāṣtrakūṭa policy of fomenting internal dissension and supporting collateral
Cālukya contenders for the Veṅgī throne apparently gained momentum around
this time. Bhīma’s uncle Yuddhamalla (a half-brother to both Bhīma’s father
Vikramāditya and Bhīma’s predecessor Vijayāditya III) probably never gained
the crown, but his descendants did so repeatedly. Yuddhamalla’s son Tāļa I ruled
for one month (927) after the death of Bhīma I’s grandson Amma I. He was
ousted by Vikramāditya II — an uncle of Amma I (thus a nephew of Bhīma I) —
who was in turn replaced after less than a year by Tāļa’s son Yuddhamalla II. It
then took six years for Amma I’s brother Bhīma II (r. 934–945) to snatch back
the crown, and when Bhīma II’s son Amma II (r. 945–970) inherited the throne
at the tender age of twelve, he first had to flee into exile from Yuddhamalla II’s
sons Bādapa and Tāļa II, who enjoyed the support of the Rāṣtrakūṭa Kṛṣṇa III (r.
939–967). After some time, Amma II apparently gained the backing of powerful
subordinates<fnref n="5" /> and returned to the throne, whereafter Yuddhamalla’s line dis-
appeared for good. However, later on Amma II had to flee anew from Kṛṣṇa III,
who set up Amma’s brother Dānārṇava to rule in Veṅgī (957). Amma did return
yet again to rule the country until 970, whereupon Dānārṇava again took over
(possibly without Rāṣtrakūṭa support). He died after a brief reign in 973, proba-
bly at the hands of the formerly subordinate Telugu-Coḍa chief Jaṭā-Coḍa
Bhīma. The latter then governed Veṅgī for the next twenty-seven years, an in-
terlude mentioned only as a period of kinglessness in the later Cālukya annals.

Much at the same time, Tailapa of the Kalyāṇa Cālukyas overthrew the
Rāṣtrakūṭas, occupied their capital Mānyakheṭa (973) and set about consolidat-
ing his supremacy. The primary external power influencing Āndhra now be-
came the ascending Cōļa empire. Rājarāja I (r. c. 985–1014) restored Dānārṇava’s
son Śaktivarman I (r. 1000–1011) to the throne of Veṅgī, and kingship subse-
quently passed to his younger brother, then to the latter’s descendants. Among

<footnote n="4">4 Bhīma I is the first Veṅgī Cālukya king whose date of accession is known precisely, recorded as the expired Śaka year 814, Caitra kṛṣṇapakṣa 2 in his *Attili grant*. Reigns preceding this date can be established with fair accuracy thanks to an unusual custom followed by almost all Eastern Cālukya grants from the time of Bhīma’s immediate predecessor Vijayāditya III onward. To wit, these grants list all previous rulers of the dynasty (including collaterals of the current king) back to Viṣṇuwardhana I, and even state the length of each one’s reign.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">5 See also note 26 on p. 104 below.</footnote>
them too, contention was fuelled by Kalyāṇa Cālukya support for one faction and Cōļa backing for another. The latter ultimately gained the upper hand, but the last scions of the Eastern Cālukya dynasty appear to have maintained only a desultory interest in increasingly contested Veṅgī. When the Cōļa male succession line died out (1070), Dānārṇava's great-grandson Rājendra succeeded to the Cōļa throne as Kulottuṅga I.

## 1.2. The value of underlings

In the centuries of internecine struggle fuelled by external interference, the loyalty of underlords and court officials could make or break a king of Veṅgī. The significance of securing the allegiance of underlings<fnref n="6" /> is clearly reflected in the nature of the recipients of grants.<fnref n="7" /> Figure 2 shows the proportion of various kinds of recipients: each horizontal bar represents the totality of analysed grants issued by a given king (which varies from 1 to 15 charters), while the actual number of grants is shown inside the bars, separately for each class of donee.

Over the first good two centuries of the dynasty's existence, from the reign of Viṣṇuvardhana I (r. c. 624–641) to that of Viṣṇuvardhana V (r. c. 847–849), all 43 of the analysed charters are “classical” religious donations. Two were given to Hindu temples and three to Jaina ones, while the recipients of the other 38 are run-of-the-mill Brāhmaṇa donees (singly, in small groups or occasionally in large groups). These people — whom I shall for want of a better term call householder Brāhmaṇas — receive land essentially by dint of being qualified Brāhmaṇas, and what is expected from them in return is to carry on being Brāhmaṇas and thereby generate merit for the king.

<footnote n="6">6 The scope of my term “underling” includes, but is not limited to, subordinate lords, as it also encompasses courtiers who may or may not have controlled a domain of their own, as well as officials who probably did not.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">7 This has already been observed with regard to the grants of Amma I, Bādapa and Tāļa II (Estienne-Monod 2008, 32).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_15.png" /><figcaption>Figure 2. Recipients of Eastern Cālukya grants</figcaption></figure>

However, in the time of Vijayāditya III (r. c. 849–892) — the first ruler of Veṅgī to contend with a collateral candidate backed by the Rāṣṭrakūṭas — there emerges a novel class of donee, to which I shall refer as the political Brāhmaṇa. Unlike his householder fellow, the political Brāhmaṇa is a minister, a court official or even a general of the king and seems to receive grants as reward or incentive for his services in this function. Two of the five known grants of Vijayāditya III go to such political Brāhmaṇas: one to a counsellor —

that foremost of the Brāhmaṇa class whose marvellous advice pleased [Vijayāditya] when in a battle teeming with horses and soldiers struck down by various weapons and with enraged elephants he [Vijayāditya] slew Maṅgi,
who had defeated the entire host of enemy rulers and in an exuberance of passion ridiculed the munificence, courage and prowess of the king — <fnref n="8" />

and another to a warlord of Brāhmaṇa extraction, who —

overcoming indomitable enemies by the blade of his single sword, seizes great riches and offers them to his lord.<fnref n="9" />

With the next king Bhīma I (and the escalation of Rāṣtrakūṭa interference in Veṅgī politics), another class of donees makes its debut: secular dignitaries — such as court officials and members of wealthy and/or influential families — who are either explicitly not Brāhmaṇas or are not stated to be Brāhmaṇas. Out of 35 analysed grants issued in roughly eight decades from the reign of Bhīma I (r. 892–921) to that of Dānārṇava (r. 969–971), classical pious donations represent less than thirty percent.<fnref n="10" /> Of these ten grants, one went to a Jaina temple, two to a Jaina teacher, one to a Hindu temple and six to householder Brāhmaṇas.

A further five (14%) were awarded to Brāhmaṇas who have no evident political impact, but are described in more detail or in different terms than regular householder Brāhmaṇa donees.<fnref n="11" /> The recipients of another four (11%) were political Brāhmaṇas, and a staggering 14 (40%) went to a diverse cast of lay

<footnote n="8">8 The Masulipatam plates of Vijayāditya III, v. 5: *hatvā maṁgiṁ vijita-sakalārāti-bhūpāla-varggamī rāgodrekād dhasita-nṛpati-tyāga-śauryya-pratāpaṁ| nānā-hety-āhata-haya-bhaṭonmatta-hasti-prakīrṇṇe yuddhe yasya dvija-gaṇa-varasyādbhutādeśa-tuṣṭah||*</footnote>

<footnote n="9">9 The Kāṭlapaṇṇu grant of Vijayāditya III, v. 31: *dussādhyān sādhayitvārīn svasyaivaikāsi-dhārayā| dravyāṇy āḥṛtya bhūyāṁsi svāmine yaḥ prayacchati||*</footnote>

<footnote n="10">10 The pattern appears to hold for the grants of later rulers too, but I disregard these in the present statistical summary because I have not yet re-edited many of the extant later charters. The texts of the four later charters that I have re-edited so far have been included in the analysis presented later in this article.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">11 Three of these atypical Brāhmaṇas have nonetheless been classified as “ritualists” for my textual analysis (see 3.1 below), including two who undertook ascetic observance for the merit of their lord (in the Māṁgallu grant of Dānārṇava and the Velambaru grant of Amma I) and one who may be an official of an underlord (in the Kolaveṇṇu plates of Bhīma II). Another, noted for his hospitality and for his politically active sons, has been classified as a “dignitary” (in the Ākulamannaṇḍu grant of Bhīma II), while the fifth is said to be Amma II’s kula-brāhmaṇa, but could not be included in the textual analysis since he is not described in the extant portion of the Masulipatam incomplete plates of Amma II.</footnote>
dignitaries<fnref n="12" /> such as Śrī-Mahādevī, the (probably widowed) wife of Bhīma I's castellan <fnref n="13" /> Vijayāditya, a lady of a minor Cālukya lineage who —

was slender but bent with [the weight of] her plump and firm breasts; her eyes were bright and wide, her fingers, toes, soles and palms resembled tender aśoka sprigs, her navel was recessed and her hips heavy, her lips were like a ripe *bimba* fruit, and her complexion was like heated gold — <fnref n="14" />

or the apparently low-ranking soldier Vemarāja who had undertaken a vow to accumulate merit for his king Vijayāditya IV, and whose grandfather had ascended an elephant as a favour of Vijayāditya III, and —

who by his daring is a Śūdraka of the Kali age — <fnref n="15" />

or the warlord Bhaṇḍanāditya who —

by sounding the drum of heroes while defeating the force of [my, Amma I's] enemies in the thick of battle, [became] an abode of great reputation hallmarked by the sobriquet “Kuntāditya,” [and] having pleased my mind, attained a position as [my] retainer and obtained [my] favour [through being] a conqueror of puffed-up enemy rulers with numerous troops, and elevated [both] by his illustrious descent and by [the might of his own] arms. <fnref n="16" />

A similar trend is evident in the grants made by a king at an underling's instigation. In the charters of the Eastern Cālukyas, instigation is usually denoted by a form of the verb *vijñapayati* in the earlier grants, and by a form of *prārthayati* in

<footnote n="12">12 The reason these percentages do not add up to 100% is that some grants are partially preserved, and their donees cannot be classified.</footnote>

<footnote n="13">13 “Castellan” is my provisional rendering of the term *kaṭakarāja*, a term frequently featured (with many variants) in grants of the Eastern Cālukyas. It is usually taken to denote an official in charge of the royal camp (e.g. Sircar 1966, s.v.), but in Veṅgī the *kaṭakarāja* seems actually to have been a general executive “hand of the king” in all kinds of affairs. The position was, at least for several generations, hereditary.</footnote>

<footnote n="14">14 The *Moga grant* of Bhīma I, vv. 8–9: *tat-sutāṁ śrī-mahādevīṁ dhavalāyata-locanām| aśoka-pallavākāra-pāṇi-pāda-talāṁguliṁ|| pīnonnata-kucānamrāṁ nimna-nābhīṁ guru-kṣitām| pakva-bimbādharān tanvīṁ tapta-hema-prabhāṁ śubhāṁ||*.</footnote>

<footnote n="15">15 The *Cevuru plates* of Amma I, ll. 20–21: *vemarājo nāma subhaṭaḥ sāhasena kali-yuga-śūdrako*. The reference is to the mythical King Śūdraka, associated with valour in literature and legend.</footnote>

<footnote n="16">16 The *Ederu plates* of Amma I, v. 15: *śātrūṇāṁ tumuleṣu vīra-paṭahaṁ saṁśrāvyā jitvā balaṁ kuṁtāditya iti śrutāṁkita-mahā-kīrtti-pratāpālayaḥ| mac-cittaṁ paritoṣya bhṛtya-padavīṁ labdhvā prasādaṁ gataḥ sphītāneka-balāri-bhūpa-vijaya-śrī-janma-bāhūnnatiḥ||*.</footnote>
later ones, although other expressions also occur in both periods. The following overview only considers grants in which instigation is explicitly mentioned.<fnref n="17" />

Five (12%) of the 43 analysed grants issued before the reign of Vijayāditya III (i.e. to the middle of the ninth century) were explicitly instigated. In two of these, however, the petitioner is a Jaina teacher who secures a grant for his tem-ple.<fnref n="18" /> There are thus only three grants of this period that were made at the in-stigation of a subordinate, and only one of these persons — the instigator of the single known grant of Indra Bhaṭṭāraka — is presented in any detail:

> the firstborn son, named Indravarman, of King Koṇḍivarman, who was an ornament of the sky of the Āryāhū lineage.<fnref n="19" />

Here, the qualification as an ornament of his lineage and the title of King (mahārāja) go syntactically with the father, but may have been intended by the composer to describe the instigator himself. The petitioners of the remaining two are merely named, without any further qualification whatsoever.<fnref n="20" />

Conversely, among the 40 analysed grants issued by the kings from Vijayāditya III (r. c. 849–892) to Dānārṇava (r. 969–971), there are nine (23%) that were issued upon request. Seven of these were petitioned by personages of conspicuous political, military, or financial importance, such as the castellan Durgarāja, who was —

<footnote n="17">17 Instigation may be implicit in cases where someone constructs a temple which is then endowed with a royal grant (in the Musinikuṇḍa grant of Viṣṇuwardhana III and the Pedda-Gālidiparru grant of Amma II), or where a non-Brāhmaṇa obtains a grant and in the same charter passes the entire gift on to someone else, who may be Brāhmaṇa or non-Brāhmaṇa (in the Kākamrāṇu grant of Bhīma I [briefly discussed below] the Ārumbāka grant of Bādapa, and the Interu grant of Bādapa). Except for the Musinikuṇḍa grant, all of these disregarded cases belong to the latter period discussed here, so they affirm the same trend.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">18 These are the two sets of Peddāpurappādu plates of Viṣṇuwardhana II. A third, previously unpublished set found with these two has been reported to feature the same teacher (Annual Report on Indian Epigraphy 1997–98 [Ravishankar 2011], App. A. No. 3). Since the completion of the research presented here, I have edited this set as VengiCalukya00096 (Peddā-purappādu plates (set 3) of Viṣṇuwardhana II), and can now confirm that this third grant was also issued at his request.</footnote>

<footnote n="19">19 The Koṇḍaṇagūru grant of Indra Bhaṭṭāraka, ll. 26–26: āryyāhū-vaṁśa-gagana-tilaka-bhūta-koṇḍivarmmaṇo mahārājasyāgra-suta-indravarmma-nāma-dheya-vijñāpanayā.</footnote>

<footnote n="20">20 These are the London plates of Maṅgi Yuvarāja and the Peṇukaparu grant of Jayasiṁha II, instigated by Gaṇadugarāja and Gobbaḍi respectively. Neither of these people are known from other grants of the dynasty.</footnote>
a repository of eminent qualities and a residence of heroic majesty, virtuous, honest, selfless, opulent, magnanimous and victorious in battle; moreover, his sword ever served solely for guarding the royal majesty of the Cālukyas, and his famous lineage {bamboo cane} [ever served solely] as a support {prop} to the superb great country called Veṅgī.<fnref n="21" />

Political impact is not clearly evident, but also likely in the other two. One of these (the Sātalūru plates of Vijayāditya III) was instigated by a Nṛpakāma introduced as the king's younger brother (anuja) but not known from other sources.<fnref n="22" /> He may have been a foster brother or milk-brother belonging to a prominent family rather than a blood brother, but whichever the case, his allegiance would have been crucial to Vijayāditya in his rivalry with his other brother Yuddhamalla. The second (the Kalucumbarru grant of Amma II) was made at the instance of Cāmekāmbā, a lady introduced as a courtesan (gaṇikā), but obviously an influential one, as she belonged to the Paṭṭavardhinī family known from multiple other records and described in this grant as "belonging to the retinue of the majestic royal Calukya dynasty."<fnref n="23" />

Even more telling than the mere number of instigated grants is the length and detail of description lavished on the instigators. As noted above, the instigators with potential political significance before Vijayāditya III are barely portrayed at all. Directly (in passages describing their persons) and indirectly (in passages describing their forebears or other relations), the three of them together receive two attributions in my analysis,<fnref n="24" /> i.e. on average less than one attribution per instigator. This is shown in the upper rows of Table 1, while the lower rows of the same table show the seven grants instigated by persons of unquestionable political significance from the period between Vijayāditya III and Dānārṇava. These together feature six aristocrats, as Durgarāja, part of whose description has been cited above from the Maliyapūṇḍi grant of Amma II,

<footnote n="21">21 The Maliyapūṇḍi grant of Amma II, v. 16: tat-putro durggarājaḥ pravara-guṇa-nidhir ddhārmmikas satyavādī tyāgī bhogī mahātmā samitiṣu vijayī vīra-lakṣmī-nivāsaḥ| cālukyānāmī ca lakṣmyā yad-asir api sadā rakṣaṇāyaiva vaṁśaḥ khyāto yasyāpi veṅgī-gadita-vara-mahā-manḍalālāmbanāya||.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">22 Unless he is a predecessor of Nṛpakāma Saronātha mentioned below.</footnote>

<footnote n="23">23 L. 52: śrī-rāja-calukyānvaya-parivārita-paṭṭavardddhikānvaya.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">24 By "attribution" I mean the association of a quality or action with a person; see section 2.2 for further details. The two attributions in this case are that Indravarman's father Koṇdivarman was a mahārāja and that he was an ornament of his lineage. In terms of my analysis, this is the total number of attributions with these people as a "focus," including those pertaining to the foci themselves as well as those pertaining to their "satellites." See section 3.2 below for the explanation of these terms.</footnote>
was also the instigator of the *Vemalūrpāḍu plates of Amma II* where the donee, Durgarāja's minister Musiya, steals all the thunder with 8 direct and 8 indirect attributions, while Durgarāja himself is barely mentioned. The six instigators between them are allotted 55 direct attributions and another 71 indirect ones. That is to say, on average, each of them garners thirty times as much recognition as their fellows had in the earlier period.

<table><caption>Table 1. Politically significant instigators in Eastern Cālukya grants</caption><thead><tr><th rowspan="2">grant/plates</th><th rowspan="2">issued by</th><th rowspan="2">instigated by</th><th colspan="3">attributions for instigator</th></tr><tr><th>direct</th><th>indirect</th><th>total</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Koṇdanagūru</td><td>Indra Bhaṭṭāraka</td><td>Indravarman</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>London</td><td>Maṅgi Yuvarāja</td><td>Gaṇadugarāja</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td>Peṇukapaṛu</td><td>Jayasimha II</td><td>Gobbaḍi</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>total, 7th century to 849</td><td>0</td><td>2</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>average, 7th century to 849</td><td>0</td><td>0.7</td><td>0.7</td></tr><tr><td>Bezvāḍa</td><td>Bhima I</td><td>Kusumayudha</td><td>2</td><td>0</td><td>2</td></tr><tr><td>Kolaveṇṇu</td><td>Bhima II</td><td>Vājjaya</td><td>9</td><td>0</td><td>9</td></tr><tr><td>Guṇḍugolanu</td><td>Amma II</td><td>Nṛpakāma Saronātha</td><td>5</td><td>5</td><td>10</td></tr><tr><td>Maliyapūṇḍi</td><td>Amma II</td><td>Durgarāja</td><td>14</td><td>6</td><td>20</td></tr><tr><td>Pedda-Gālīdipaṛu</td><td>Amma II</td><td>Bhima and Naravāhana</td><td>18</td><td>36</td><td>54</td></tr><tr><td>Vemalūrpāḍu</td><td>Amma II</td><td>Durgarāja</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Māṅgallu</td><td>Dānārṇava</td><td>Guṇḍyana</td><td>7</td><td>23</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>total, 849 to 971</td><td>55</td><td>71</td><td>126</td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>average, 849 to 971</td><td>9.2</td><td>11.8</td><td>21</td></tr></tbody></table>

Nicholas Dirks (1976, 149–51) has noted the rising prominence of petitioners in Pallava grants from the end of the seventh century onward, and especially from the reign of Nandivarman II Pallavamalla in the mid-eighth century. He links this to a model of kingship based on shared sovereignty, where subordinates partake of perquisites that were formerly the sole property of the overlord. Following up on his work, Burton Stein (1998, 158–59, 171) has emphasised the importance of public honour, as opposed to mere mention, accorded to the petitioner, and observed that it signifies a new idiom of incorporative kingship rather than the first emergence of a wholly new kingship model. He further discussed (ibid., 163–69) how this new idiom was particularly relevant to the Pallavas striving to establish dominion over lands traditionally ruled by other dynasties, and even more so to Nandivarman II, who rose to power from a collateral line of his house amidst a dynastic crisis and succeeded in consolidating his reign.

The Cālukyas of Veṅgī likewise had to assert their power over local lordlings with a history of allegiance to other sovereigns, and the “incorporative” representation of underlords certainly takes centre stage at a time when they were
undergoing a dynastic crisis. Indeed, many of the non-royal protagonists of their grants clearly conform to a pyramidal model where subordinate foci of power are limited replicas of higher foci (e.g. Stein 1977, 9–11). The lineage of castellans to which the above-mentioned Vijayāditya and his son Durgarāja belonged clearly had, in addition to a hereditary court position, its own core area in the southern marches of Veṅgī (now in the Prakasam District of Andhra Pradesh), which they controlled at least since the days of the former’s grandfather Pāṇḍaraṅga. Pāṇḍaraṅga himself was Vijayāditya III’s general and castellan, but also commissioned stone inscriptions in his own name;<fnref n="25" /> Durgarāja (and presumably his forebears too) had his own minister (the Vemalūrpāḍu plates of Amma II, discussed above). Much the same probably applies to other instigators (as well as to many secular donees), some of whom evidently held dominions of their own,<fnref n="26" /> were accorded titles,<fnref n="27" /> or belonged to illustrious lineages.<fnref n="28" />

Yet the rollcall of personages honoured in the grants is by no means limited to petty kings. I have already pointed above to the soldier Vemarāja: Amma I (in his Cevuru plates) made him the headman (grāmakūṭa) of a village, implying that he had no other lands to his name.<fnref n="29" /> The courtesan Cāmekāmbā (in the Kalucum-barru grant of Amma II) was evidently involved in some deep power games, but

<footnote n="25">25 See Butterworth and Venugopaul Chetty (1905), *Ongole 3*, 39, and 40; Kandukur 31 and 32. For *Ongole 3*, see also Lakshmana Rao (1927–28). On Pāṇḍaraṅga in copious, if somewhat overenthusiastic, detail, see Suryanarayana (1987, 10–13).</footnote>

<footnote n="26">26 Such as the Saronāthas, named after their power base at a lake, probably the Kolleru lake. Nṛpakāma Saronātha has been mentioned above as the instigator of the *Guṇḍugolanu grant of Amma II*, from which we learn that he was Amma’s father-in-law. Interestingly, he was, probably at an earlier time, also given a grant and recognition by Amma II’s rival Bādapa (in his *Ārumbāka grant*).</footnote>

<footnote n="27">27 For example, among the instigators listed above, Kusumāyudha has his name prefixed with śrī (Bezvāḍa plates of Bhīma I), while Vājjaya is identified as a kṣitīśa (Kolaveṇṇu plates of Bhīma II).</footnote>

<footnote n="28">28 Among the above instigators, Vājjaya may belong to a house named Pānara (Kolaveṇṇu plates of Bhīma II); Nṛpakāma is of the Saronātha or Saraṇpati lineage (Guṇḍugolanu grant of Amma II); Durgarāja’s family does not seem to have a permanent name, but as noted above, he is descended from the famous Pāṇḍaraṅga, whose line is called kaṭakarāja-vaṁśa in the *Moga grant of Bhīma I*; Guṇḍyana belongs to a family called Sāmanta Voḍḍi (Māṅgallu grant of Dānārṇava), had ancestors with the title (or name?) rāṣṭrakūṭa, and bears the surname Kākatya, being possibly a predecessor of the later royal Kākatīyas (Parabrahma Sastry 1978, 15–20).</footnote>

<footnote n="29">29 He probably did have a claim to that particular village, since his grandfather Candeyarāja had been headman (rāṣṭrakūṭa, here probably equivalent to *grāmakūṭa*) there. Vemarāja’s father was Candeyarāja’s younger son, however, so he presumably had no clear hereditary right to the position.</footnote>
was assuredly not a typical node in a hierarchy of rulers. The brothers Bhīma
and Naravāhana in Table 1 above belonged to a family named the Triṇayana kula
(the Pedda-Gālīdiparru grant of Amma II), apparently of mercantile background.
Their grandfather had become head of the royal chancellery (śrīkaraṇa), and
King Bhīma II had conferred on the two brothers the rank and insignia of a
“baron” (sāmanta), but this may have been a formal title without actual control
of much territory or armed force. The donee of the Kākamrāṇu grant of Bhīma I is
explicitly a Vaiśya, though a powerful one (vaiśyādhipa) whose father “surpassed
even Kubera in affluence.” He receives a village from the king and donates it
right away to a throng of no fewer than ninety Brāhmaṇas. Another donation of
Bhīma I (in his Attili grant) goes to a courtesan (or at any rate a musician lady)
whose father had apparently been born out of wedlock to another courtesan.
This diverse cast is the subject of the analysis presented herein.

## 1.3. Textual analysis

The method adopted for this investigation belongs to a diverse methodological
family derived from an approach known by the name Content Analysis. Content
Analysis investigates meaning in texts and is, according to one of its great ex-
ponents, the recently deceased Klaus Krippendorff, “an empirically grounded
method, exploratory in process, and predictive or inferential in intent” (Krip-
pendorff 2004, xvii). The term was first used in 1941 by Bernard Berelson, who
also published the first systematic description of the method in 1952, after
which it quickly spread from its original application in propaganda studies to
other disciplines such as psychology and ethnography.<fnref n="30" />

With this dispersion and the accompanying adaptation to varied research
interests and metatheoretical stances came a methodological diversification,
boosted further by advances in communication theory and literary studies.
Complementing the initial focus on quantitative analysis and deductive infer-
ence, the method branched out to allow for a qualitative approach focusing on
inductive inferences. These two varieties are often labelled Classical or Quanti-
tative Content Analysis on the one hand and Qualitative Content Analysis on the
other, but in actual fact many studies employing Content Analysis methodology
encompass both quantitative and qualitative aspects or phases. The dichotomy
of qualitative versus quantitative analysis is rather a fuzzy spectrum, and the
term “Mixed Methods” is often used for investigations taking advantage of both.

<footnote n="30">30 A detailed history of the method may be found in Krippendorff (2004, 3–17) and Schreier (2012, 9–13).</footnote>
Some purely or predominantly qualitative approaches focusing on exploration and description have been developed in great detail and are distinguished from both qualitative and quantitative content analysis.<fnref n="31" /> These include Applied The- matic Analysis (Guest, MacQueen, and Namey 2012) concerned with the identi- fication of salient themes and patterns within texts, and Grounded Theory, more accurately the Grounded Theory Method (e.g. Charmaz 2014; Bryant 2017), devised for the inductive construction of theories on the basis of actions and processes featured in texts.

In this article I use the relatively neutral term “textual analysis”<fnref n="32" /> to refer to all members of this methodological family, bound together through a shared essential core of data reduction by means of “coding.” They start with data that were not created for the purpose of being analysed — namely texts in the broad sense encompassing primarily written language but often including recorded speech and extensible to non-linguistic messages — then proceed with “locating meaning in the data” (Guest, MacQueen, and Namey 2012, 49) and systematising it through the application of codes. Data reduction is neither a denial of poly- semy nor an insinuation that the reduced data represent the sum total of what the texts have to say, but a pragmatic technique to facilitate analysis. Losing certain specifics on the individual level is the price one pays for being able to learn more about the aggregate level (Schreier 2012, 7–8), and any insights gained thereby remain open to additional exploration by other methods.<fnref n="33" />

A “code” in textual analysis methodology refers not to computer code but to “a word or short phrase that symbolically assigns a summative, salient, essence- capturing, and/or evocative attribute for a portion of language-based or visual data” (Saldaña 2016, 4). In coding, one reads the text closely with attention to its conceptual context and the research interest, and assigns an applicable code to relevant points in the text. Coding is thus a kind of indexing whereby various loci in the text are identified as pertinent to a particular field of interest. De- pending on the specific method, codes may be predetermined (on the basis of theoretical considerations or of previous research on related material), or they may emerge gradually and evolve in the course of multiple iterations of the cod- ing process. While coding can be applied to many aspects of a text (including for instance grammatical structure, narratological features or poetic devices), the

<footnote n="31">31 For a detailed discussion of the diverse methodologies, see Guest, MacQueen, and Namey (2012, 3–12) and Schreier (2012, 13–17).</footnote>

<footnote n="32">32 The expression “textual analysis” is sometimes used to distinguish exploratory analyses from “content analysis” proper which is then defined as obligatorily drawing inferences to social reality (Schreier 2012, 180).</footnote>

<footnote n="33">33 See also J. Horstmann (2020, 158–62) for a discussion of “scalable reading.”</footnote>
kind of analysis I pursue here attaches codes to the meaning of linguistic content.

Whereas earlier theories of content analysis often conceived of meaning as something inherent in the text and objectively discoverable there, the method itself is fully reconcilable with the idea of meaning arising out of a complex interaction of text, context, and recipient. Constraining the essential multifariousness of meaning to a manageable level of diversity is in fact another, often implicit, aspect of data reduction in textual analysis. The analyst on the one hand excludes potential meanings which are irrelevant to the subject of research, and on the other hand restricts potential meanings to those applicable to a particular context in which the texts have been read and of which the analyst is knowledgeable.<fnref n="34" />

## 2. Method

### 2.1. The textual corpus

Out of the copperplate records issued by the Eastern Cālukya rulers over roughly four and a half centuries of the dynasty's existence, more than a hundred and forty are now known to scholarship, though only a scant hundred of these have been so far published in internationally accessible editions (with more than another dozen published only in Telugu periodicals). In the course of building the DHARMA Project's Eastern Cālukya corpus, I have processed 87 copperplate grants so far. These include 3 novel editions on the basis of photographs, 52 thorough reeditions based on the collation of previous editions with good rubbings and/or photographs, and 32 more or less deficient reeditions where the visual documentation supplementing the published editions was inadequate, incomplete or wholly absent. My efforts have been directed mostly at the grants issued by the rulers up to Dānārṇava, of which I have (more or less thoroughly depending on the available visual documentation) edited or reedited 83. Grants issued by subsequent rulers are therefore underrepresented in the analysis presented in this paper, which encompasses all the 87 charters that I have encoded.

<footnote n="34">34 See Krippendorff (2004, 22–25) and Schreier (2012, 176–78) for in-depth discussion of these considerations.</footnote>
## 2.2. Methodological overview

Here follows a quick summary of the actual method of analysis that I have pursued. A fuller account is in preparation for publication.<fnref n="35" /> The DHARMA editions used as a basis for my textual analysis are encoded in EpiDoc XML,<fnref n="36" /> and it is in principle possible to supplement their encoding with XML tags representing textual-analytical codes. There is, however, no out-of-the-box solution to accomplish this, whereas devising a custom encoding from scratch and integrating it with the EpiDoc of the editions would not have been pragmatic. I therefore extracted plain text renderings of each of these editions, creating a “curated text” in which editorial emendations and restorations were not distinguished from the received text.

I then used a simple, custom XML markup to add classificatory data to each text, including a unique identifier, a title, a corpus identifier, an identifier of the ruler who issued the charter in question, and an approximate date (hereafter: text metadata). Also using custom XML, I tagged passages describing a particular person and annotated them with further classificatory data to specify who is described (hereafter: description metadata). The description metadata are introduced in more detail below (2.3).

The actual analytical coding for content — the classification of how someone is described — was implemented in the open-source web application CATMA, a tool designed for undogmatic literary annotation.<fnref n="37" /> Since my research interest is the representation of people, my units of analysis were attributions of characteristic traits or actions to a person. This does not include identificatory

<footnote n="35">35 So far, I have only written in Hungarian about a preliminary attempt to use a much sketchier and immature version of the method deployed here (Balogh 2023a). A more mature iteration of that early foray (Balogh *forthcoming a*) as well as a more detailed description of my methodology (Balogh *forthcoming b*) are in press, and the technical details (Balogh *in preparation*) are underway.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">36 Here, “encoding” means the creation of digital editions involving computer code, not content-analytical coding. EpiDoc is a subset of the TEI standard for the representation of texts in digital form using the XML markup language. See e.g. Bodard (2010) for an introduction to EpiDoc and Balogh and Griffiths (2020) for details of the DHARMA project’s EpiDoc encoding.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">37 CATMA (Gius et al. 2022), for “Computer Assisted Text Markup and Analysis,” was developed and is being maintained at the University of Hamburg. The creation of its version 6, used for this study, is connected to the forTEXT project funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. In the meantime, CATMA version 7 has been launched. For further information see J. Horstmann (2020) and the tool’s website https://catma.de. I take this opportunity to thank lead developer Malte Meister for his help with CATMA (email communication, June to August 2022).</footnote>
details (such as personal, family and *gotra* names, Vedic schools, etc.), but does
include titles and epithets when these are used in addition to, rather than in-
stead of, a name. One attribution may thus be as brief as one word (or one mem-
ber of a compound word), or — in principle — as long as several sentences or
stanzas describing a single particular action. Each attribution was tagged with
exactly one code representing the most salient — and analytically most relevant
— trait being asserted thereby.

The list of possible codes and the much shorter list of “dimensions” into
which I classified the codes were developed on the go, in several iterations of
coding and reflection. Multiple cycles of coding conducted in this manner are
generally characteristic of qualitative approaches and have been elaborated
with great sophistication in the Grounded Theory Method (e.g. Bryant 2017, 96–
97). Starting with a preliminary list of codes, in this qualitative stage of the anal-
ysis I closely read a limited number of texts, and with each attribution I consid-
ered whether an already existing code provides an adequate indication of what
is being attributed, or whether a new code needs to be created to give it justice.
In a subsequent reflection phase, I considered splitting certain codes into two,
merging two or more existing codes into a single one, and assigning codes to
more abstract dimensions. In the course of this work, I made much use of
CATMA’s functions to retrieve text tagged with a specific code and display it in
context, to semi-automatically add codes to text on the basis of search queries,
and to replace selected instances of an existing code with a different code. After
two cycles of coding and reflection I completed the final coding of the entire
corpus of text. For the analysis presented in this paper, I have made some final
tweaks to the conceptual hierarchy of the codes, reassigning some of them to a
different dimension. This rearrangement did not as a rule affect the codes in the
text, only the manner in which particular codes were treated in the analysis.
The set of codes and dimensions is introduced below (2.4).

While CATMA includes some analytical utilities, it does not cater for the
largely quantitative analyses I intended to pursue in the next stage. Moreover,
I needed to analyse my codes of descriptive content in conjunction with the text
and description metadata encoded earlier, and CATMA at present provides only
very rudimentary means of analysing combinations of codes. I therefore ex-
ported all my code data from CATMA and created an Excel spreadsheet in which
I could, after some complex transformations, create exactly one record for
every instance of a descriptive code and incorporate in each of these records
the metadata for the descriptive passage containing that particular code as well as the metadata for the text containing the passage.<fnref n="38" />

Rendered in this manner, the data could then be investigated in a number of ways including, but by no means limited to, those presented in this paper. At the most basic level, they could be used like an index to look up descriptions meeting specific criteria, such as descriptions of dignitaries in charters issued by a particular ruler. At a slightly higher level of complexity, they could be utilised for demographic statistics, for instance to obtain lists of particular kinds of protagonists described in particular subsets of the corpus, or the total number of attributions used to describe these people, as for instance in Table 3. I have taken advantage of both of these methods while writing section 1.2 above. A more complex investigation involving the creation of “personality profiles” for various sets of protagonists will be introduced in section 2.5 profiles’ below.

## 2.3. Description metadata: “Who is described?”

In addition to describing protagonists — key players in the grant process such as the issuer and the donee — the texts frequently include descriptions of some ancestors (and occasionally other relatives) of a protagonist. As indicated above while discussing direct and indirect attributions about people, in my view these other people are not presented per se, but to enhance the representation of the protagonist to whom they are related. This has led me to conceptualise the descriptions in grants as having a potentially separate “focus” and “target.” By focus, I mean a protagonist whom the text was meant to represent to the audience, while a target is the particular person being described. For the relationship of the target of a description to its focus, I use the term “orbit.” Focus, target, and orbit together comprise the basic metadata for identifying who is being described in any particular descriptive passage.

Foci (i.e. protagonists being represented to the audience) are allocated in my analysis to one of four classes. “Sovereign” is used for descriptions focused on the ruler who issued the charter in question. “Ritualist” includes typical householder Brāhmaṇas as well as people in a priestly occupation (such as temple priests), regardless of whether or not they are Brāhmaṇas. “Dignitary” denotes people occupying a politically prominent position, including Brāhmaṇa ministers as well as members of the warrior elite. Finally, foci who do not qualify for any of these three positively defined classes are classified as “Commoner.” This

<footnote n="38">38 This data table is available for download (Balogh 2023b). The procedure by which the data were created and rendered will be discussed in a separate publication on the method (Balogh in preparation).</footnote>
diverse but small catchall group includes three engravers, three courtesans or society women, two soldiers without an apparent high rank, a merchant, and a poet. The present article is primarily concerned with descriptions of foci of the Dignitary class.

The orbit (i.e. the relationship of the target to the focus) is designated as “self” when the person being described is himself or herself the focus of a description. Orbits other than self (that is, relations of the target to the focus other than identity) are collectively termed “satellite orbits.” In my actual metadata, satellite orbits are specified more precisely with relationship terms (such as “grandfather”) or collective terms (such as “lineage”), but the full detail would be beyond the scope of this paper.

Combinations of these two facets of a description — focus class and orbit designation — can then be used as criteria for analysing descriptions of various groups. To allow for further differentiation, I have explicitly encoded the gender of each target who is an individual, and the religious affiliation of all ritualist targets. In addition, targets (i.e. the actual persons being described) could be identified individually (using a normalised form of their name) to allow for analysing descriptions of a particular person regardless of the text in which these occur, and regardless of whether they appear as the focus of a description or as a satellite.<fnref n="39" /> The target identifiers did not play a role in the present investigation.

## 2.4. Descriptive codes: “How is someone described?”

My analysis of the Eastern Cālukya copperplate corpus employs 184 unique codes. These are arranged into twelve large groups, to which I shall refer as dimensions. The actual hierarchy often involves additional levels: categories intermediate between codes and top-level dimensions, serving to group together codes that are similar enough to be considered variations on a core theme, but distinct enough that keeping them separate may be useful for research. This set of codes and the hierarchy of dimensions to which they can be allocated is the primary outcome of the qualitative stage of analysis.

Most of the comparisons I present below are concerned only with top-level dimensions, but the use of intermediate categories facilitates “zooming in on” certain details while still retaining a wider perspective on the data, as illustrated in Figure 8 below. For an even closer look, some codes carry additional

<footnote n="39">39 In my actual setup, I have chosen not to use individual identifiers for ritualists and their satellites, because such persons are present in large numbers in my texts, but their descriptions are almost always short and highly stereotyped, and a single individual is hardly ever described in more than one charter.</footnote>
"properties," which have not been used in this analysis, but which serve to make certain details retrievable without looking up the text. For instance, the code for religious devotion carries with it a property "toWhom," specifying the object of devotion. Similar detail is sometimes represented on the codes themselves, such as in the case of education, where I have used more than twenty distinct codes to tag education in various fields.

In order to facilitate management and sorting, my codes begin with an initial slash followed by three uppercase letters identifying the dimension to which the code belongs. The codes end in a term<fnref n="40" /> intended to capture the essence of the code, separated by a colon from the dimension acronym. Codes with more than two hierarchical levels include additional terms for the intermediate level or levels, each separated by colons. Thus, the code `/INT:education:science:logic` is on the fourth (deepest) level of the hierarchy, along with several other subclasses of `/INT:education:science`. This third-level code in turn has several peers within the second-level category of `/INT:education`, which together with several other codes on that level comprises the dimension of Intellect.

Here follows a description of the twelve dimensions of my analysis, with some examples of codes belonging to each.<fnref n="41" /> The order in which the dimensions are presented is largely arbitrary, since the dimensions are in principle independent. Because their independence may not in fact be complete, and because I find that this facilitates reading the charts in which findings are plotted (2.5), I have attempted to place conceptually similar dimensions close to each other.

**Prestige** is comprised of qualities pertinent to reputation and recognition as well as displays or symbols of status. While most attributions in every dimension carry a connotation of prestige, this dimension groups traits and actions in which prestige is primary. This includes public shows of generosity, distinguished from charity and patronage which come under Benevolence. Examples:

- /PRE:majesty. Possessing or being the master of majesty or royal fortune (śrī).

- /PRE:glory. Having glory (*yaśas*); descriptions of glorification (e.g. sitting on In-dra's throne).

- /PRE:reputation. Having reputation (*kīrti, nuti*), being famous (*khyāta, viśruta, prasiddha*).

- /PRE:opulence. Having richness, opulence, magnificence, splendour (*vibhava, vibhūti, sampad, dhana, vṛddhi, ādhyatva, bhoga; lakṣmī/padma* when this seems distinct from *rājyaśrī*). Includes several more specific subcategories such as

- /PRE:opulence:generosity. Generosity, bountifulness, or magnanimousness in a

<footnote n="40">40 Or occasionally a brief phrase written in “camel case,” e.g. favouredByLord.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">41 The full list of codes and their definitions is included in my dataset (Balogh 2023b).</footnote>
general sense (audārya, prasāda, dāna; comparisons to kalpa-taru and kāma-dhenu), without specific recipients and without mention of renunciation.

– /PRE:opulence:hospitality. Honouring (pūj-, ārādh-, sev-) guests (atithi); descriptions of hospitality, respect or food offered to others.

– /PRE:titleRoyal. Being designated as “king” or “queen” without any particular distinction (devī, rājan, nṛpa, bhūpati, kṣitīśa, etc.). Includes several more specific subcategories, which also permit recording the actual title as a property, such as

– /PRE:title:royal:supreme. Possessing a royal title or designation indicating supreme or sovereign status (mahārājādhirāja, parama-bhaṭṭāraka, parameśvara).

**Dominance** aggregates qualities or actions representing political or social domination or sovereignty, the act of overcoming or the state of having overcome others. It is distinguished from Eminence, which is superiority without a sense of aggression or control. Examples:

– /DOM:casualVictory. Nonchalance, ease, or playfulness in defeating or overpowering others, e.g. doing so in a moment (kṣaṇa-vaśīkṛta), with a mere frown (bhrū-bhaṅga-mātra), all alone (khaḍga-mātra-sahāya), playfully (līlayā), or without even intending to.

– /DOM:homage. Receiving homage, typically having one's feet worshipped (with light cast on the feet from subordinates' crowns), but also including simpler and more generic acts of homage by subordinates (vandita, nuta, ārādhita).

– /DOM:indomitability. Possession of authority, power or an army that is irresistible, impossible to challenge or to overcome (apratihata, alaṁghya, aparājita).

**Belligerence** groups together warlike or aggressive qualities and actions. It is distinguished from Dominance, which means the state of having asserted superiority, and from Prowess, which is about potential rather than actual warlike-ness. Examples:

– /BEL:exploits. Carrying out a specific heroic exploit or martial feat, e.g. making a brave stand, executing a tactical manoeuvre, penetrating into a notable region with one's army.

– /BEL:ferocity. Being ferocious or fearsome (caṇḍa, bhīma, ugra, parantapa); displaying wrath (kopa, krodha); description of fear (bhaya, trāsa) caused by the target; causing an enemy to flee (vidruta). Includes bad omens or portents afflicting the target's enemies. Includes more specific subcategories such as

– /BEL:ferocity:gruesome. Gruesome or graphic details of martial deeds, such as skulls, slaughtered mounts, decapitation, being bathed in blood. This applies to actual descriptions of the target's deeds, not to generic battle scenes.

– /BEL:war. Waging war, participating in battles (yuddha, samara). Includes subcategories such as

– /BEL:war:conquest. Conquering a country or region (vāsavīm jitvāśāṁ, maṇḍalam āptavān). Includes obtaining a new kingdom by conquest, but does
not include generic reference to the acquisition of kingship by a dynasty, such as by the favour of a god (prasāda-labdha-rājya). Distinguished from the subjugation of persons, which is an act of Dominance.

**Prowess** is the collective name for qualities of physical prowess or aggressive potential. It is distinguished from Belligerence, which applies to aggressive action rather than potential, and from Dominance, which refers to the condition of having overpowered others. Examples:

- /PRO:army. Possessing a strong army or troops (senā, cakra, camū, bhaṭa, bala).

- /PRO:brawn. Having physical strength, strength of arm (bhuja, bāhu, dos with or without -bala), which may be meant metaphorically.

- /PRO:valour. Having valour, bravery (vikrama, parākrama, vīrya, śaurya); being fearless, brave, courageous (atrasta, abhaya); being a hero (vīra, ajeya); performing unspecified heroic deeds (sāhasa).

**Competence** refers to qualities of personal talent, proficiency, or aptitude other than Intellect and Prowess. It is distinguished from Eminence, which does not involve any particular skill or quality. Examples:

- /COM:capacity. Possessing capacity, potential or power (śakti, prabhāva, anubhāva, aiśvarya, prabhutva) in a generic sense.

- /COM:quality. Possessing unspecified virtues or good qualities (guṇa), mentioned in general, as being appropriate to kings or Brāhmaṇas (brahma-guṇa, kṣatra-guṇa), or in addition to (-ādi-guṇa-gaṇa) specified qualities (which should be tagged as applicable).

- /COM:steadfastness. Steadfastness, stalwartness, reliability, perseverance (dhairya, dhṛti, udyoga).

**Eminence** consists of indications of being eminent or superior to others, distinguished from Dominance by a lack of the sense of overpowering, and from Competence by the emphasis on being outstanding rather than on having any particular skill. Examples:

- /EMI:exaltedness. Being noble in spirit, exalted or magnanimous (ārya, mahātman, mahā-sattva, udita, udāra when not meaning generous); generic references to high social standing may be tagged so.

- /EMI:excellence. Being outstanding, superior, or unique: the best (uttama, vara, bhūṣaṇa, candra, siṁha, mukhya, rāja, iśvara, indra) or an ornament (ratna, tilaka, cūḍāmaṇi; alaṁkariṣṇu) of a group or the world; being incomparable (nirupama, ananya-sādhāraṇa, asama, atula).

- /EMI:pedigree. Having a high birth (janma, abhijana) or a good family (kula), belonging to a praiseworthy gotra or spiritual lineage (when that gotra or lineage is not described in enough detail to warrant a description tag of its own). The mere
naming of the target's family or *gotra* does not qualify for this tag, only the actual claim that it is a notable one.

**Intellect** groups together traits of intellectual aptitude and accomplishment. It includes both religious and secular fields, but not the application of religious or Brahmanical knowledge, which normally belongs to Morality. Examples:

- /INT:education. Having knowledge or erudition (*vidyā, jñāna, śikṣā, adhyayana*) or being learned (*vidvat, paṇḍita*) without specific details. Has subcategories with an additional hierarchical level, such as

- /INT:education:science. Learnedness in science or lore (*śāstra, sūtra, āgama*) when not clearly sectarian), without a specified field, or specified as "all" or "many." With further subcategories by discipline, e.g.

- /INT:education:science:grammatics. Learnedness in grammatics (*vyākaraṇa*).

- /INT:education:vedic. Learnedness in Vedas or unspecified fields of Vedic learning (*veda, śruti*). With subcategories for specialisations.

- /INT:intelligence. Being generally intelligent or shrewd (*budha, paṭu, catura*); possessing intelligence or a sharp mind (*buddhi, manas, mati, prajñā, dhī*).

**Morality** is defined as qualities and actions involving ethical excellence and moral or religious (dharmic) duty or obligation. Distinguished from some aspects of Beneficence, which focus on benefitting others, and from some factors of Prestige, where the emphasis is on public recognition. Examples:

- /MOR:compassion. Having compassion (*dayā, maitra, kṛpā, karuṇā, ghṛṇā*).

- /MOR:conduct. Practicing good or moral conduct (*carita, cāritra, ācāra, vṛtta, śīla*), being a decent person (*sādhu, sujana*). Includes specific subcategories such as

- /MOR:conduct:discipline. Having discipline, modesty, or humility (*vinaya, hrī, niyama*), being obedient to authority other than parents (e.g. teachers), descriptions of modest behaviour.

- /MOR:duty. Doing one's duty (*kṛta-kṛtya, dharmānuṣṭhāna*); pursuing the *trivarga*; performing social/moral obligations (*anṛṇa*). Includes specific subcategories.

- /MOR:religious. Honouring or worshipping Brāhmaṇas or the gods, respecting or following the way of the Vedas. Includes specific subcategories such as

- /MOR:religious:devotion. Worshipping (*ārādh, tṛp, arc, smṛ*) or being devoted (*bhirā*). to a deity, being a bee at a god's feet.

- /MOR:righteousness. Possessing, knowing, or following *dharma* (*dhārmika, dharma-parāyaṇa, dharma-yuta, dharma-jñā*, etc.) in general or in a field other than rulership. Includes specific subcategories.

**Beneficence** comprises beneficent or benevolent qualities, actions, or effects. Distinguished from some members of Morality and Prestige by an emphasis on the benefit to others. Examples:
- /BEN:charity. Donating to, succouring, or helping those who seek help (arthin, āśrita, yācaka); the destitute (dīna, anātha, daridra) or the ailing (andhaka, ātura).

- /BEN:patronage. Supporting, pleasing, being kind to or donating to good or de-
serving people (sajjana, sādhu, pātra). Includes specific subcategories such as

- /BEN:patronage:clients. Supporting, uplifting, rewarding, or honouring (man-) relatives, associates, friends, and retainers (bandhu, mitra, bhṛtya, poṣya, anujīvin); bestowing rewards where due (kṛta-jña).

- /BEN:protection. Providing protection or shelter (pālana, āśraya, trāṇa) to sub- jects or in general. Not to be used when verbs meaning protection are used merely in the sense of “rule.”

**Submission** is made up of qualities and actions indicating subordination to or dependency on a greater power. Examples:

- /SUB:favouredByLord. Having the favour of one's lord (priya, lālita, jita-hṛdaya); receiving favours or rewards (prasāda, tulayā dhāraṇa) from one's lord.

- /SUB:job. Occupying an office, being a servant, functionary, or retainer (bhṛtya, sevaka, anucara, niyukta, parivāra) of a lord. With specific subcategories such as

- /SUB:job:military. Engaging in martial acts for a lord, including being a cham-
pion (malla, aṅkakāra) or soldier (bhaṭa) for a lord.

- /SUB:service. Rendering service or undertaking efforts (kṛta-kleśa, sahāya, sev-) for the sake of one's lord; acting according to the wishes of or desiring to please one's lord; raising or restoring the lord's fortune; undertaking an observance for one's lord. Includes specific subcategories, e.g.

- /SUB:service:death. Dying in service of or sacrificing life for one's lord.

**Appeal** consists of qualities of charisma, appeal, or attractiveness. Examples:

- /APP:affection. Inspiring affection or joy (āhlādana, ānanda) in, or being loved by or dear to (manorama, manohara, priya) the world, people, the subjects.

- /APP:beauty. Comeliness, physical attractiveness, handsomeness (kānti, rūpa, ruc, dyuti); phrases indicating generic beauty. With numerous specific subcategories such as

- /APP:beauty:breasts. Prominent, full, or attractive breasts.

- /APP:beauty:shoulders. Wide or muscular shoulders.

- /APP:charm. Being charming or likeable in an unspecified way (cāru). Includes subcategories such as

- /APP:charm:kindness. Being kind in speech (priya-vāk, sūnṛta-vāk).

**Entitlement** is made up of circumstances of being entitled to rulership or sov-
erignty. While many qualities associated with rulers fulfil a function of
“legitimation,” this dimension is for items that do not fit any other, more spe-
cific category. Examples:
- /ENT:ancestral. Mytho-historical ancestry, *gotra* name, metronymic, (e.g. *hāritī-putra, mānavya-sagotra*) as presumable qualification for rulership. Only for claims of ancestral lineage, not for mentioning individual mytho-historical ancestors as part of a genealogy. Not applicable to the *gotras* of Brāhmaṇas.

- /ENT:sacrifice. Performance of royal sacrifices as client.

- /ENT:sanction. Being endorsed by a certain person or group, as per the subcategories, which include

- /ENT:sanction:divine. Favour of a divinity as presumable mandate for rulership. Typically *-anudhyāta* and *-prasāda*, but also including *-anudhyāyin* and *-bhakta* when used in contexts implying divine sanction.

- /ENT:sanction: dynastic. Succession sanctioned (*anudhyāta*) by parent(s) or predecessor.

- /ENT:sanction:popular. Succession desired or welcomed by the populace.

## 2.5. Charting and reading representational profiles

Apart from simple demographic statistics, the principal way in which I have utilised my content coding for analysis has been the creation of profiles. In Figure 2, for illustration, I show a profile comprised of the twelve dimensions of representational content as introduced above, calculated for an aggregate of all the descriptions in the analysed corpus. The profile is plotted as a spider chart. Each spoke of such a chart represents a variable, in this case one of the twelve dimensions. The mark on any particular spoke represents the relative prevalence of that particular variable (dimension) in the sample being plotted, in this case the whole of my data. Thus, in this figure, the dimension of Prestige is extremely prominent, Belligerence, Eminence and Morality are in the mid-range, while Appeal and Submission are barely present.

Both the set of variables and the sample of data can of course be different. The spokes could correspond to a smaller subset of the 12 dimensions, or to the second-level categories of any particular dimension; in principle, one could even draw up a chart with 184 spokes for each of the distinct codes. As for the sample, the aggregate of all data is only used here as an illustration, but where spider charts really come into their own is in comparison. Such charts may be plotted for any subset of the data delimited on the basis of the text metadata and/or description metadata described above. This allows putting the profiles of, for instance, dignitaries and issuing sovereigns side by side or one atop the other to facilitate the evaluation of differences.
<figure><img src="image_16.png" /><figcaption>Figure 3. A spider chart profile of representational dimensions for all descriptions in the corpus. The dimensions, clockwise from top, are Prestige, Dominance, Belligerence, Prowess, Competence, Emignence, Intellect, Morality, Beneficence, Submission, Appeal, and Entitlement.</figcaption></figure>

While these charts are intuitively very informative, in order to use them as more
than technicolour illustrations spat out by number-crunchers, a few additional
technicalities must be kept in mind. First of all, prevalence in this context means
more specifically frequency:<fnref n="42" /> the total number of times a code relevant to a
specific dimension occurs in the reduced data, i.e. the total number of times a
trait or quality relevant to that dimension is mentioned in the sample of pas-
sages selected for an analysis. That is to say, if a certain trait is attributed

<footnote n="42">42 See e.g. Guest, MacQueen, and Namey (2012, 138–41) about the use of frequencies in analysing thematic data.</footnote>
repeatedly (whether within a single descriptive passage, in multiple descriptive
passages within a single text, or in multiple passages across texts), then its prev-
alence will be greater than if that particular trait were attributed only once.

Later descriptions within the Eastern Cālukya corpus tend to be more ver-
bose than earlier ones, so if we were to compare, for instance, a late and an early
ruler with regard to a single dimension of representation, we would probably
find that the dimension in question is more prevalent in the later sovereign; the
same result would probably obtain in comparing (typically long) descriptions of
kings to (typically much shorter) descriptions of underlings. In both cases, the
likely root of the observed difference is simply that the right boxes are ticked a
greater number of times in a longer description, and not that the trait being
studied is more emphatically presented in some descriptions.

In order to eliminate such bias, all the charts presented here are based on
relative, not absolute, frequency. That is: rather than plotting the number of
times codes of a particular kind occur in a particular subset of the data, I plot
the proportion (percentage) of codes of that particular kind relative to the total
number of attributions made for that particular subset of the data. If, say, a sam-
ple of sovereigns is claimed to be prestigious ten times out of a total of fifty at-
tributions, and a contrasted sample of underlings is claimed to be prestigious
twice out of a total of ten attributions, the relative prominence of Prestige is the
same (20%) in both samples.

Another characteristic of the analysis and presentation to be kept in mind is
that the dimensions are in principle independent, and their order is altogether
arbitrary. The very different shapes plotted in a chart with the dimensions in,
say, alphabetical order clockwise from top would carry exactly the same infor-
mation as the charts presented here. Furthermore, although spider charts re-
semble a rolled-up line chart in appearance, the adjacent spokes (axes) repre-
sent discrete variables, rather than different measurement instances of a single
variable. The line connecting the values plotted on each axis is thus not in itself
meaningful and only serves as a prop for visualisation.

Finally, in discussing the profiles, I sometimes use turns of phrase along the
lines of “sovereigns are more prestigious than dignitaries.” Such statements are
not claims about actual social reality (though some of them may be correct as
such), but simply a quicker and less cumbersome way of saying that “the rela-
tive prevalence of prestige is higher in the representation of sovereigns than in
that of dignitaries.” Even this more circumspect expression is, moreover, only
factually correct inasmuch as the data under analysis are concerned, and apply
to “prestige,” “sovereigns” and “dignitaries” as defined for the purpose of this
analysis.
### 3. Discussion of results

This section presents the findings from the quantitative stage of my textual analysis. If the concepts and terminology used here are difficult to follow, please refer back to section 2 above. The terms “focus,” “orbit” and “satellite” are defined in 2.3; “dimensions” are explained (with their three-letter abbreviations listed) in 2.4, and the charts used for illustration are introduced in 2.5, where I also discuss some caveats. The data altogether comprise 5779 individual attributions, of which 4432 pertain to sovereigns, 916 to dignitaries, 364 to ritualists and 67 to commoners; Table 2 below shows a finer breakdown of the number of attributions in various classes.

#### 3.1. Foci: sovereigns, dignitaries, ritualists, and commoners

Figure 4 shows the profiles obtained for the four kinds of foci distinguished in the analysis; Table 2 presents the same data in numerical form, giving the absolute number of attributions in each cell. Although the chart is something of a jumble, it can already reveal a number of things about the way Eastern Cālukya grants represent protagonists. Incidentally, it reassures us that pursuing this analytical route is not futile, for the four profiles shown in different colours are quite differently shaped. We can also read from this chart the qualities most prominently ascribed in the grants to the four focus classes and point out which class receives the highest proportion of ascriptions in any given dimension.

Thus, at a glance, the sovereigns who issued the charters (indicated by a purple profile) are generally represented as having enormous prestige; entitlement, dominance and belligerence are quite prevalent in their descriptions, while their qualities of appeal, submission and intellect are negligible. The dignitaries (shown in blue) have a somewhat similarly shaped profile, implying an underlying commonality between noblemen and royalty. However, in their descriptions, attributions of morality and eminence feature even more prominently than prestige, and much more conspicuously than in sovereigns. Intellect is also more prevalent than in the representation of sovereigns, and traits indicative of submission make their appearance. The commoners (green) are most notably qualified by eminence; similarly to dignitaries, morality, prestige, intellect, and submission are prevalent in their descriptions, whereas belligerence is largely absent from their characterisation. Ritualists (orange) are unlike any other group in that intellect is far and wide their most prominent quality, with morality a distant second, but still more prevalent than in the other classes. Prestige is important among ritualists too, but less so than in any of the other focus classes, while competence, though about as emphatic as prestige, is
in this class again more prominent than in any other. All other dimensions are,
however, barely if at all present here.

<figure><img src="image_17.png" /><figcaption>Figure 4. Profiles of different foci in the corpus as a whole. The dimensions, clockwise from top, are Prestige, Dominance, Belligerence, Prowess, Competence, Eminence, Intellect, Morality, Beneficence, Submission, Appeal, and Entitlement.</figcaption></figure>
<table><caption>Table 2. Number of attributions by dimension and focus class</caption><thead><tr><th></th><th>sovereign</th><th>dignitary</th><th>ritualist</th><th>commoner</th><th>total</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><th>prestige</th><td>1081</td><td>144</td><td>41</td><td>9</td><td>1275</td></tr><tr><th>dominance</th><td>505</td><td>16</td><td>4</td><td>0</td><td>525</td></tr><tr><th>belligerence</th><td>532</td><td>49</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>582</td></tr><tr><th>prowess</th><td>283</td><td>71</td><td>1</td><td>1</td><td>356</td></tr><tr><th>competence</th><td>221</td><td>63</td><td>37</td><td>5</td><td>326</td></tr><tr><th>eminence</th><td>414</td><td>159</td><td>37</td><td>18</td><td>628</td></tr><tr><th>intellect</th><td>75</td><td>86</td><td>151</td><td>7</td><td>319</td></tr><tr><th>morality</th><td>316</td><td>170</td><td>73</td><td>11</td><td>570</td></tr><tr><th>beneficence</th><td>291</td><td>34</td><td>10</td><td>1</td><td>336</td></tr><tr><th>submission</th><td>12</td><td>86</td><td>7</td><td>7</td><td>112</td></tr><tr><th>appeal</th><td>101</td><td>38</td><td>3</td><td>6</td><td>148</td></tr><tr><th>entitlement</th><td>601</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>1</td><td>602</td></tr><tr><th>total</th><td>4432</td><td>916</td><td>364</td><td>67</td><td>5779</td></tr></tbody></table>

## 3.2. Orbits: self and satellites

As indicated above, one of the assumptions underlying my analysis of representation is that the copperplate charters are concerned with projecting an image of the protagonists of the grant, primarily the donor and the donee. Thus, when a text portrays somebody’s illustrious family, conquering grandfather, doe-eyed wife, or diligent son, this is done primarily to elaborate and enhance the image of that somebody (the focus), and not to project a separate image of the family, grandfather, wife, or son (the satellites). In all of my comparative analyses elsewhere in this paper, the descriptions of satellite orbits are accordingly lumped with the descriptions of the foci themselves. Doing so increases the amount of data involved in the analysis and thus aids in the recognition of patterns which may, for smaller amounts of data, be obscured by random variation in the sample. It is, however, worth keeping in mind that, at least within certain focus classes, there also seem to be trends in the attribution of various traits to different orbits. In this section I explore these trends briefly before shutting the door on them to foreground the patterns of difference between focus classes.

For this analysis, I have bundled together the individual orbits corresponding to patrilineal predecessors and successors not limited to the direct line of descent but including collaterals (such as uncles).<fnref n="43" /> I use the name “patriline” as a collective term for these orbits, and compare their descriptions with those

<footnote n="43">43 Successors are not presented in the texts as a rule, but in a few cases the son or sons of a focus are described.</footnote>
of the “self” and “lineage” orbits.<fnref n="44" /> Recall that “lineage” is the term for descriptions of a person’s dynasty or family as a whole as opposed to individual descriptions of particular members of that family, and is thus a different entity than the patriline. The profiles for these three types of orbit deviate from each other differently in the different classes of focus. Due to the small quantity of data, the representation of ritualists and commoners cannot be meaningfully broken down into separate orbits, so I limit the discussion to sovereigns and dignitaries.

Figure 5 shows the profiles for these three orbits in the focus class of sovereigns. Prestige is an important trait for all the orbits, but most emphatic in the sovereign himself (29.2%), followed closely by his patriline (24.6%) and less closely by his lineage (16%). The royal dynasty as a whole is predominantly characterised by entitlement to sovereignty (54.3%), which is barely present in the descriptions of individual people such as the sovereign himself (3.5%) or his patrilineal predecessors (0.8%). Dominance is likewise primarily indicated for the lineage (20.5%), but is also present, if less prevalent, in the descriptions of the sovereign (8.2%) and his patriline (9.7%). In the descriptions of patrilineal predecessors, attributions of belligerence feature prominently (21.9%), while being more of a background note in “self” descriptions (9.1%) and altogether absent from the representation of the lineage (0%). The current rulers themselves stand out in eminence (13%) and beneficence (10%), but the patriline follows quite closely behind the sovereign in both of these dimensions (9.1% and 7.1% respectively), while the dynasty lags far behind (1.3% and 0%). Morality is of relatively minor, but constant importance throughout the orbits (at 7% in self profiles and the patriline, and 7.4% for the lineage). All other dimensions (viz. prowess, competence, intellect, and appeal) are absent or negligible (0% to 0.2%) in descriptions of the ruling house, while being present to some extent (roughly 2 to 10%) in the portrayals of the sovereign himself and his patriline.

<footnote n="44">44 This classification does not cover all possible orbits: targets described in the corpus also include some spouses, some matrilineal predecessors, some predecessors in a spiritual (teacher-disciple) lineage, and some spiritual lineages or schools as a whole. Such cases are excluded from the analysis in this section.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_18.png" /><figcaption>Figure 5. *Self, patriline and lineage profiles for sovereigns. The dimensions, clockwise from top, are Prestige, Dominance, Belligerence, Prowess, Competence, Eminence, Intellect, Morality, Beneficence, Submission, Appeal, and Entitlement.*</figcaption></figure>

The simplistic, yet probably not altogether wrong, gist of this is that according
to the royal ideology of these grants, the dynasty as a whole comes invested
with entitlement to sovereignty and has a claim to universal dominion. The
reigning king's forebears have asserted their prerogative through martial ac-
tion, but the current king himself is not essentially belligerent. What is
important about him personally is rather that he bears great prestige and does
a decent job at ruling.<fnref n="45" />

Figure 6 shows the same breakdown into self, patriline and lineage for the focus class of dignitaries. Here, the orbit profiles are more alike than in the case of sovereigns, yet there are some conspicuous differences. The lineage descriptions stand highest in the dimensions of prestige (26.3%), competence (15.8%) and eminence (26.3%). Dominance, belligerence, prowess, beneficence, and appeal are, however, not present at all in the lineage descriptions, while featuring to some extent in the presentation of dignitaries themselves and of their patrilineal predecessors. The self and patriline profiles are exceedingly similar except for the dimension of submission, which is very prevalent in the dignitaries themselves (13.5%), markedly present in their lineages (10.5%), but less conspicuous in their predecessors (5%). A smaller but noticeable difference shows in competence, which is lowest in self profiles (4.9%) and middling in the patriline (10.3%). Entitlement is absent from all three orbits, and they differ very little as regards intellect (9% to 10.5%).

Since these comparisons are based on a fairly small number of actual attrib-
utions, inferences based on them must be savoured with a pinch of salt; they do,
however, provide fertile ground for speculation. The distribution of the profiles
in the dimensions of prestige, competence, and eminence — in each of which
lineage stands first, followed by patriline and self coming in last — probably
points to the importance of aristocratic dynasties. There is little room for self-
made men here: for an underling to be worthy in the eyes of the sovereign, he
had to be backed by a traditionally powerful family of subordinates.

Some of the variance in other dimensions may, perhaps, reflect a milieu of
uncertain and occasionally shifting allegiance. To be sure, some families of un-
derlings are praised in the grants for remaining loyal to the Cālukyas over gen-
erations, which perhaps accounts for the prevalence of submission on lineage
descriptions. In other cases, the actual focus himself is noted for being a faithful
subordinate, but submission is rarely featured in the portrayal of patrilineal
predecessors. This may imply that some of our protagonists had forebears who
stood on the other side of the battlefield or political arena, wherefore the grant
composers preferred to maintain a dignified silence as regards their submis-

<footnote n="45">45 This division of work across orbits need not, however, be characteristic of other dynasties. The Maitrakas of Valabhī, for a counterexample, characterise their dynasty as dominant through belligerence rather than innate entitlement. The phrase “the Maitrakas, whose antagonists were forcibly prostrated” (prasabha-praṇatāmitrāṇām maitrakānām) occurs in practically all their grants with an extant preamble (Annette Schmiedchen, personal communication, 30 March 2021).</footnote>
siveness. The slightly different configuration of morality, which features prominently in self and patriline descriptions but less so in the presentation of dignitary dynasties, could be explained along similar lines, supposing that some noble houses hedged their bets in their play for power. Their pro-Cālukya sciences, current and historic, thus earned the Cālukya suzerains' praise for morality, but the lineages as a whole did not.

<figure><img src="image_19.png" /><figcaption>Figure 6. Self, patriline and lineage profiles for dignitaries. The dimensions, clockwise from top, are Prestige, Dominance, Belligerence, Prowess, Competence, Eminence, Intellect, Morality, Beneficence, Submission, Appeal, and Entitlement.</figcaption></figure>
The absence of belligerence and prowess in the portrayal of noble houses (and their simultaneous presence in self and patriline profiles) may also indicate that the recognition of such competencies was reserved for loyal retainers. However, given the analogous lack of emphasis on these dimensions in the sovereign dynasty, it is likely that there was a general preference to see these traits as individual rather than familial.

<figure><img src="image_20.png" /><figcaption>Figure 7. Profiles of sovereigns and dignitaries. The dimensions, clockwise from top, are Prestige, Dominance, Belligerence, Prowess, Competence, Eminence, Intellect, Morality, Beneficence, Submission, Appeal, and Entitlement.</figcaption></figure>
### 3.3. Kings and underlings

In order to be able to compare sovereigns and dignitaries more closely, Figure 7 shows the same profiles as Figure 4 above, but with ritualists and commoners excluded. In addition to reducing clutter, this eliminates the extremely high values of intellect in ritualists and eminence in commoners, in effect allowing us to zoom in on the chart for a clearer view of values under 25%. As partly already noticed above, sovereigns outdo dignitaries in terms of prestige, dominance, belligerence, beneficence, and entitlement. Conversely, dignitaries surpass sovereigns in prowess, competence, eminence, intellect, morality, submission, and appeal.

#### 3.3.1. Entitlement and dominance

The greatest disparity between the generic profiles for sovereigns and dignitaries obtains in the dimension of entitlement. Attributions of this trait make up 13.6% of the profile of sovereigns (being the second most common kind of attribution in this class of foci), but are completely absent in the profile of dignitaries (0%, thus the least prevalent). The dimension of entitlement has been defined above as consisting of circumstances of being entitled to rulership or sovereignty that do not fit any other, more specific category. These include being endorsed by a divine being, by one's parents or by the populace, as well as claims of having or winning the people's loyalty (anurāga), possessing bodily features indicative of a universal sovereign (cakravartin), having performed kingmaking sacrifices, and being descended from a mythical or divine being. Entitlement is frequently attributed to the current ruler. This takes place most commonly by claiming that his succession was sanctioned by his parents (mātā-pitṛ-pādānudhyātah), but is also indicated by the loyalty, or even the choice, of the subjects. However, as noted above, entitlement is most strongly featured in the standard description of the dynasty:

> the lineage of the majestic Calukyas — who are of the Mānavya *gotra* which is praised by the entire world, who are sons of Hāritī, who attained kingship by the grace of Kauśikī's boon, who are protected by the band of Mothers, who were deliberately appointed (to kingship) by Lord Mahāsena, to whom the realms of adversaries instantaneously submit at the [mere] sight of the superior Boar emblem they have acquired by the grace of the divine
Nārāyaṇa, and whose bodies have been hallowed through washing in the pu-
rificatory ablutions of the Aśvamedha sacrifice...<fnref n="46" />

The sharpness of the distinction in entitlement between sovereigns and dignitaries may to some extent be due to my classification of codes. Claims of a good family or a high birth have been assigned to the dimension of Eminence (/EMI:pedigree), but carry implications similar to some aspects of Entitlement. Moreover, much the same implication is implicitly present when some ancestors or the family of a protagonist are named or described, but this nearly ubiquitous feature of all descriptions has not been coded as an attribution applicable to that protagonist.<fnref n="47" />

In a pattern similar to entitlement, dominance comprises 11.4% of all attrib-
utions pertaining to sovereigns, and is thus the fourth most prevalent kind of
claim for such foci. Conversely, among dignitaries it only comes to 1.8%, which
makes it the second least prevalent attribution in that class. This dimension has
been defined as political or social domination or sovereignty, the act of over-
coming or the state of having overcome others. It thus includes a fairly dispar-
ate (though not very large) set of codes, among which the most frequent in both
groups are claims of fame extending all over the earth (distinguished from rep-
utation which, without this qualification of pervasiveness, is a component of the
dimension of Prestige).<fnref n="48" /> For dignitaries, almost all other attributions of domi-
nance involve aggression, such as the subjugation of others and the vanquishing
of powerful enemies (both of which are distinguished from unqualified victory,
which contributes to belligerence).<fnref n="49" /> Such claims are not absent from the dom-
inant traits of sovereigns, but there, the emphasis on overt aggression is

<footnote n="46">46 The Zulakallu plates of Vijayāditya I, ll. 1–5: śrīmatāṁ sakala-bhuvana-saṁstūyamāna- mānavya-sagotrāṇāṁ hāritī-putrāṇāṁ kauśikī-vara-prasāda-labdha-rājyānāṁ māṭṛ-gaṇa- paripālitānāṁ svāmi-mahāsena-pādānudhyātānāṁ bhagavan-nārāyaṇa-prasāda-samāsādita- vara-varāha-lāṁchanekṣaṇa-ksaṇa-vaśikṛtārāti-maṇḍalānām aśvamedhāvabhṛtha-snāna-pavi- trīkṛta-vapuṣāṁ calukyānāṁ kulam.</footnote>

<footnote n="47">47 As a borderline case, the Nāgiyapūṇḍi grant of Amma II describes the subordinate Bikkirāja's grandfather as belonging to the Solar lineage (sūrya-vaṁśa). I have taken this as a name and accordingly did not assign a code to it, but it could have been interpreted instead as an attribution of divine ancestry, thus an aspect of entitlement. See also p. 157 about a lady classified as a commoner (thus excluded from the present discussion), who definitely boasts of divine ancestry.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">48 The code /DOM:famePervasive amounts to 31.3% of all dominant attributions pertaining to dignitaries, and 23.2% of those pertaining to sovereigns.</footnote>

<footnote n="49">49 These are /DOM:subjugation and /DOM:enemyEminent, which together make up another 50% of dominant attributions on dignitaries.</footnote>
matched by attributions of superiority, as in claims of having subjugated every
possible rival and of vanquishing enemies with playful ease.<fnref n="50" />

### 3.3.2. Submission

Submission amounts to 9.4% in the characterisation of dignitaries (tied in the fourth prevalence rank with intellect), but only to 0.3% (being the least prevalent kind of attribution) in that of sovereigns. As indicated above, the dimension of submission consists in attributions that a protagonist has performed certain services for or occupies a certain office under a higher power, as well as indications of gaining or wishing to gain the favour of a higher power. For example, the Veṅgī Cālukya king Tā II introduces his minister Kuppanayya as follows:

> with [Tā]a II’s] heart moved to supreme compassion by the diverse services of an extremely staunch man of Pallava lineage who has won his master’s heart by the pains he undertook and by his good conduct, who has proved worthy in the four trials (of honesty) and has been appointed to the rank of “Great Baronial Minister,” and who is ornamented with all the multitude of virtues and brilliant in [serving] the cause of his lord...<fnref n="51" />

There are, by my count, six separate attributions of various kinds of submission here,<fnref n="52" /> and Kuppanayya’s father adds two more, since he —

> had undertaken pains and died in our service.<fnref n="53" />

Attributions of dependency pertaining to dignitaries usually concern the services done for their overlord and the offices held.<fnref n="54" /> As for the Eastern Cālukyas themselves, although their aspirations for universal dominion were only occasionally fulfilled, and then only for a given value of “universal,” they

<footnote n="50">50 /DOM:paramountcy and /DOM:casualVictory together represent over 33% of attributions of dominance for sovereigns.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">51 The Śrīpūṇḍi grant of Tā II, ll. 20–24: parama-nibhṛtasya kṛta-kleśācāra-jita-svāmi-hṛdayasya pallavānvayasya catur-upadhā-śuddhasya mahā-sāmantāmātya-pada-niyuktasya sakala-guṇa-gaṇālaṁkṛtasya patīhita-dhavalasya nānā-kiṁkurvvāṇatayā parama-karuṇāpanna-hṛdayas san.</footnote>

<footnote n="52">52 kṛta-kleśācāra (/SUB:service), jita-svāmi-hṛdayasya (/SUB:favouredByLord), sāmantāmātya (/SUB:job:minister), pada-niyuktasya (/SUB:job), patīhita (/SUB:service) and nānā-kiṁkurvvāṇatayā (/SUB:job). Arguably, mahā-sāmantāmātya-pada-niyuktasya could be counted as a single attribution instead of my two.</footnote>

<footnote n="53">53 *Ibid.*, ll. 27–28: asmat-prastāva-mṛtasya kṛta-kleśasya.</footnote>

<footnote n="54">54 /SUB:service with its subcategories and /SUB:job with its subcategories together comprise a hair over 80% of all attributions of submission in dignitaries. This is not illustrated in a chart here.</footnote>
nonetheless consistently projected an image of possessing, or at least being eli-
gible to possess such dominion. In doing so, they clearly set themselves apart
from their underlings, in whose characterisation submissiveness played a prom-
inent role.

The handful of attributions of submission pertaining to Veṅgī Cālukya kings or their satellites are of three kinds. Out of the twelve such attributions in my corpus, six are cases where a member of the royal dynasty is described as acting in a military capacity for a senior member of his own family. This is once said of Bhīma II, who was apparently a general and regent on behalf of his underage nephew Vijayāditya V — the appointed successor of Bhīma II’s elder brother Amma I — before ascending to the throne in his own name.<fnref n="55" /> The other five occurrences of this scenario are instances of a stock stanza describing Vikramāditya I as an army general.<fnref n="56" /> Vikramāditya I probably never donned the crown, but he was the appointed yuvarāja of his elder brother Vijayāditya III, and the father of the next king Bhīma I. Clearly, he commanded armies for his brother in the capacity of yuvarāja.

In two cases, conversely, subordination to a Rāṣtrakūṭa suzerain is openly acknowledged by a king of Veṅgī. Both times, this is a member of a collateral line who temporarily displaced the formal successor to the throne. Thus, Amma II’s rival, his brother Dānārṇava, pays lip service to Amma, then in the same breath announces that Amma has presently departed to Kaliṅga, and that the Rāṣtrakūṭa king (Kṛṣṇa III) has given the kingdom to Dānārṇava:

Magnificent like (Indra) the Lord of the Gods, crowned with the turban, his
son Ammarāja (II) defeated his enemies and protected the earth for eleven
years, [then] went to the Kaliṅgas because of Kṛṣṇa's wrath. [Now] his half-
brother, Lord Dānārṇava, [the son] of Bhīma (II) born of the body of Aṅkidevī

<footnote n="55">55 This is my interpretation of v. 2 of the *Diggubarru grant of Bhīma II*, whose relevant part (literally as received) is *bhimo mma-sūno bbhaṭas san māsāṣṭakam āvad eva vasudhāṁn* (v. 2). The charter’s original editor, John Faithfull Fleet, made an emendation I consider unwarranted (-sūnur bbhaṭas, where -sūnor bbhaṭas would be more appropriate), and interpreted the stanza to refer to an otherwise wholly unknown son of Amma I, whom he called Bhīma III (Fleet 1891b, 269). The existence of this person has been widely accepted owing to Fleet’s nimbus (e.g. Krishna Rao 1934–35, 29; Nilakanta Sastri and Venkataramanayya 1960, 928), but in my opinion he is a phantom.</footnote>

<footnote n="56">56 This stanza occurs with negligible variation in five known grants issued by at least three different kings from Amma II onward, including the *Nāgiyapūṇḍi grant* and the *Masulipatam incomplete plates of Amma II*. The relevant text is *tad-bhrātur vvikramāditya-bhūpates sac-camūpateḥ*.</footnote>
likewise protects the earth to the delight of all the populace and according to the policy of Manu, having obtained kingship from the Vallabha.<fnref n="57" />

Most interesting are the four remaining attributions of royal submission. All of these apply to Vijayāditya III, who during part of his reign was subordinate to Amoghavarṣa I and conducted campaigns on the latter’s behalf. Some of his much later successors took enough pride in his military successes during this period to mention them in the presentation of their forebear, apparently attempting to downplay — without denying — the fact that these were achieved in a subordinate capacity. Thus, a charter of Amma II prevaricates:

> His (Kali-Viṣṇuwardhana's) eldest son, that Lord Guṇaga Vijayāditya, the champion to whose arms the Vallabha king personally paid homage, and who was moreover the foremost of heroes and the turban jewel of good soldiers...<fnref n="58" />

### 3.3.3. *Intellect and other competencies*

The fourth dimension in which dignitaries differ markedly from sovereigns is that of intellect. 9.4% of all attributions pertaining to dignitaries concern intellect, whereas the prevalence of this dimension is only 1.7% in the profile of sovereigns. As observed above, intellect shares the fourth rank with submission in the dignitary profile; in the profile of kings, however, it comes second last, preceding only submission.

My interpretation of this finding is that personal merit was deemed to be relatively irrelevant (and/or taken for granted) in the case of sovereigns, whose kingly status was by and large a given. Conversely, among underlings, aptitude and merit were probably fundamental criteria of selective promotion. In line

<footnote n="57">57 The Māṅgallu grant of Dānārṇava, v. 4. sūnus tasyāmma-rājas surapati-vibhavaḥ paṭṭa-baddho dharitṛimṛ rakṣann ekādaśābdān jita-ripur agamat kṛṣṇa-kopāt kaliṁgān| tasya dvaimāturaḥ kṣmāmṛ sakala-jana-mude vallabhād āpta-rājyo bhaimo dānārṇṇaveśo 'py avati manu-nayād aṁkidevī-tanūjaḥ||. The other episode of this kind concerns Bādapa — Amma II's rival in succession — who in his Ārumbāka grant speaks frankly of ousting Amma II with support from Kṛṣṇa III; v. 1 āśritya karṇa-rājākhya-vallabhaṁ bādapādhipaḥ| vinirggamayya tan deśād amma-rājākhyam ūrjjitaṁ||.</footnote>

<footnote n="58">58 The Kalucuṁbarru grant of Amma II, v. 2: sutas tasya jyeṣṭho guṇaga-vijayāditya-patir aṁkakāras sākṣād vallabha-nṛpa-samabhyarccita-bhujah| pradhānah śūrāṇām api subhaṭa-cūḍāmaṇir asau. This has been coded as three distinct attributions of subordination (aṁkakāra, vallabha-nṛpa-samabhyarccita-bhujah and subhaṭa). The fourth similar attribution about Vijayāditya III is in the Eḍeru plates of Amma I, where verse 10 recounts Vijayāditya's victories in great detail, noting that he was sent on these missions by the Rāṣṭrekūṭa king (raṭṭeśa-saṁcodito).</footnote>
with this hypothesis, the dimensions of eminence, competence and prowess are
also each more prominent in the profile of dignitaries than in the profile of sov-
ereigns, although the difference between the two groups is much smaller in
these dimensions.

3.3.4. Morality

Finally, the dimension of morality deserves a closer look. This is the number one most prominent dimension in the profile of dignitaries, amounting to 18.6% of all attributions pertaining to this focus class, whereas in the kingly profile it ranks sixth, at 7.1%. Morality in my coding scheme includes attributions of performing dharmic duty as well as generic moral/ethical qualities. The moral qualities pertaining to dignitaries and sovereigns differ not only in prevalence, but also in composition. Figure 8 shows the factors contributing to morality in these two focus classes.

Sovereigns stand out in purity, but this is due to the numerous instances of a stock phrase according to which the royal lineage became “pure” or “holy” (*pavitra*) through royal sacrifice.<fnref n="59" /> If the lineage is excluded from the analysis (not illustrated), then the purity of kings becomes mediocre, and less prominent than that of dignitaries. The next most frequent contributor to royal morality is the concept of justification, which I define as the representation of aggressive action presented as arising from a moral imperative, such as couching the repression of enemies in the metaphor of light overcoming darkness. Two other categories where sovereigns surpass dignitaries, albeit only by a slight margin, are righteousness—acting or ruling in accordance with (*dharma*)—and compassion.

Dignitaries, on the other hand, are most prominently characterised by good conduct (23.2% of their morality), a trait that also features in the descriptions of sovereigns, but attains only the fourth rank there. Honesty is the second most important moral qualification of dignitaries (16.7%), and the third is religiousness. Purity is very close behind religion, and if lineage descriptions are excluded, then purity is more prevalent in dignitaries than in sovereigns.

<footnote n="59">59 See the standard description of the dynasty cited on p. 128 above.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_21.png" /><figcaption>Figure 8. Subcategories of morality in sovereigns and dignitaries. The dimensions, clockwise from top, are Prestige, Dominance, Belligerence, Prowess, Competence, Eminence, Intellect, Morality, Beneficence, Submission, Appeal, and Entitlement.</figcaption></figure>

In addition to the general finding that morality is much more crucial to the representation of dignitaries than to that of sovereigns, we can thus deduce that these two groups act in partly different, though partly overlapping, moral domains. The morality of kings is primarily concerned with dharmic duty including the justification of aggression, and only secondarily with ethical behaviour, with purity predicated as their innate property thanks to the sacrifices of their ancestors. The morality of underlings, on the other hand, is chiefly defined by ethical purity, discipline, and honesty.
## 3.4. Feminine and masculine ideals

### 3.4.1. Female and male profiles

Although only a very few actual protagonists (i.e. people in the “self” orbit) are female in my texts, women do make their appearance every now and then in the satellite orbits of various (typically male) foci. In this section, therefore, I compare female targets with male targets, primarily in the aggregated data from my corpus, but with occasional reference to particular focus classes. Table 3 shows the numbers of individual foci, the total number of targets (including the self orbits of the foci), and the total number of attributions concerning these targets, broken down by gender and by focus class.<fnref n="60" /> In the ritualist class, female targets are wholly absent: there is not a single grant in the corpus that mentions the wife or the mother of a householder Brāhmaṇa or a temple priest. Also, the number of individual males in this class could not be counted, since ritualists who are householder Brāhmaṇas (the majority) were not assigned an identifier in my coding.

<table><caption>Table 3. Female and male genders in the focus classes</caption><thead><tr><th rowspan="2"></th><th colspan="3">female</th><th colspan="3">male</th><th rowspan="2">total<br>attributions</th></tr><tr><th>foci</th><th>targets</th><th>attributions</th><th>foci</th><th>targets</th><th>attributions</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>sovereign</td><td>0</td><td>15</td><td>56</td><td>21</td><td>38</td><td>3404</td><td>3460</td></tr><tr><td>dignitary</td><td>1</td><td>13</td><td>65</td><td>45</td><td>88</td><td>832</td><td>897</td></tr><tr><td>commoner</td><td>3</td><td>5</td><td>20</td><td>7</td><td>11</td><td>46</td><td>66</td></tr><tr><td>ritualist</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>0</td><td>?</td><td>?</td><td>342</td><td>342</td></tr><tr><td>total</td><td>4</td><td>33</td><td>141</td><td>73</td><td>137</td><td>4624</td><td>4765</td></tr></tbody></table>

As shown in Figure 9, female targets on the whole are represented with a much narrower gamut of dimensions than males. In this assortment, the dimensions of eminence (36.9%), morality (25.5%) and appeal (21.3%) stand out, and are in fact far more prominent than in the aggregated male targets (12%, 9.9% and 2.6% respectively). Prestige is also quite prevalent (10.6%), but much less so than in males (23.6%). There are a few attributions of competence (3.6%), intellect

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ Attributions pertaining to lineages and spiritual lineages have been classified as genderless and therefore excluded from this analysis, which is why the total number of attributions shown in the bottom right-hand cell is less than the grand total in Table 2. These lineage entities could arguably be perceived as implicitly male, but the gender profiles may be more accurate if only explicit males are included. The only notable change that results from the inclusion of lineages in the male profile is a conspicuous spike of entitlement which, as already demonstrated, is mostly associated with the royal dynasty.</footnote>
(1.4%) and entitlement (0.7%), but the traits of dominance, belligerence, prowess, beneficence, and submission are completely absent from female profiles.

<figure><img src="image_22.png" /><figcaption>Figure 9. Male and female profiles in the aggregated data. The dimensions, clockwise from top, are Prestige, Dominance, Belligerence, Prowess, Competence, Eminence, Intellect, Morality, Beneficence, Submission, Appeal, and Entitlement.</figcaption></figure>

While there is some intriguing material in the Eastern Cālukya copperplate charters for the study of empowered women, it is not readily accessible to the methodology of textual analysis. What we see here is a bird's-eye view of women being represented mostly as stereotypical accessories to male protagonists. In the mainstream discourse of the eulogies, they are now and then praised for being eminent and prestigious (or for coming from such families), but most of
all they are pictured as being dutiful in their dependent feminine roles and look-
ing pretty:

His lotus-eyed wife — faithful to her husband, endowed with purity, morality and beauty, gentle and fertile — was named Bijjekavvā.<fnref n="61" />

Looking into female profiles broken down by focus class (not illustrated with charts), there appear several differences. As compared to the aggregated set of female targets, prestige is barely present in the profiles of the women associated with dignitary foci (1.5%), but highly prominent in the sovereign class (21.4%). The female satellites of sovereigns are overwhelmingly noted for their eminence (50%), but much less often spoken of as moral (12.5%) or appealing (10.7%). Morality is, however, conspicuously high among the women of dignitaries (38.5%). The persona of commoner women is very close to the aggregated female profile, with eminence somewhat lower (25.5%) and several other dimensions slightly higher, including appeal (30%) and intellect (5% as opposed to 0% in the womenfolk of dignitaries and 1.8% in that of sovereigns). It would be tempting to infer that some women, though not born into a royal or aristocratic family, could attain status capitalising on their wit, charm, and beauty. However, the sample of data is very small, and this as well as the other differences noted here (for which no straightforward explanation offers itself) may simply be random variation.

Male foci, in contrast, are characterised most strongly by prestige (23.6%), but attributes of belligerence (12.6%), eminence (12%) and morality (9.9%) are also prominent in the representation of males. All other dimensions are also present to a non-negligible degree, the least prominent being entitlement (under 2%), followed by submission and appeal (both 2 to 3%). The characteristics of males belonging to various focus classes are not discussed here, since the comparisons and analyses throughout this article are based predominantly on males.

### 3.4.2. Feminine and masculine appeal

Appeal is the third most prevalent dimension in female profiles. Within this dimension, attributions of physical beauty amount to 73.3% of the characterisation of women. Spousal love or conjugal felicity makes up another 13.3%. Female appeal is often noted in the class of commoners (30% of all attributions pertaining to female commoners) and dignitaries (27.7% of attributions), while being

<footnote n="61">61 The Nāgiyapūṇḍi grant of Amma II, v. 12: tasyāravinda-nayanā pati-vratā šauca-śīla-rūpa-yutāl| sādhvī putravatī yā bhāryyāsīt bijjekavvākhyā||. See also the description of Śrī-Mahādevī cited on p. 100 above.</footnote>
much less prevalent in that of sovereigns (10.7%). Only commoner women (specifically courtesans) are noted for being sexually attractive, but physical beauty is most prevalent in the appeal of dignitaries' women (83.3%) and least notable in female commoners (50%).

Although in the aggregated male profile appeal is only the third least prominent dimension (2.6%), attributions of this trait still do occur widely throughout the corpus. It is most strongly associated with the men among sovereigns (in whose profile it comes to 2.8% of all attributions) and dignitaries (2.4%). The association of appeal with ritualists is rare (0.9%), and this trait is completely absent from the profiles of commoner men (0%). As in females, the most important factor in male appeal is physical beauty (43.2%), but that category refers in this context to a rugged macho aesthetic such as broad shoulders and muscular arms. A charming demeanour and the allegation of having won the affection of others, in short, charisma, are also conspicuous among the factors of male appeal (15.5% and 19.6% respectively). In men, sexual attractiveness is strongly associated with members of the royal family (coming to 16.8% in this focus class) and, to a smaller degree, with the aristocracy (5%). Kings are frequently compared to the god Kāma in this respect, but the sex appeal befitting their alpha male status is sometimes described in more graphic detail, such as —

> the surface of whose chest is as wide as a cliff of the Golden Mountain and decorated with the remnants of saffron ointment rubbed off from the firm breasts of voluptuous women languid with desire.<fnref n="62" />

### 3.5. Kinds of underlings

While up to this point I have been treating dignitaries as a homogeneous group, let us now recall that the focus class of dignitaries in fact includes both “political Brāhmaṇas” and secular people, with most but not all of the latter being members of the military aristocracy. While my original coding for description metadata was not designed to distinguish these types from one another,<fnref n="63" /> it did involve the recording of remarks for each descriptive passage, which I used among other things to note down whether a dignitary is a Brāhmaṇa minister or a military aristocrat. For the present analysis, I used these remarks to classify dignitaries into three types: “aristocrat,” “minister” and “bureaucrat.” These are labels of convenience that may not in all cases correspond accurately to these persons’ actual function. Representatives of the aristocrat type explicitly

<footnote n="62">62 The Cendalūr plates of Maṅgi Yuvarāja, ll. 19–21: madālasa-mattakāśinī-jana-ghana-payodharāvalupyamāna-kuṁkuma-paṁkāvašeṣa-śobhita-kanaka-giri-śilā-viśāla-vakṣaḥ-sthalaḥ.</footnote>

<footnote n="63">63 See also 4.2 below.</footnote>
belong to the military elite and usually bear family names implying Kṣatriya status or royalty. Those assigned to the minister type are political Brāhmaṇas, whose Brāhmaṇahood may be explicit or implied by the activities ascribed to them and/or by their names. Many, but not all of them are explicitly ministers (e.g. *mantrin*), and some are praised for military action, although this may mean strategy and possibly tactical leadership rather than actual fighting. The bureaucrat type was assigned when neither of the former was applicable, and thus has the least internal consistency. The most prominent member of this type is a high official of the Vaiśya varṇa who, with his satellites, is described at great length. The type also includes several executors (ājñapti) who may be military aristocrats but are presented too tersely to ascertain this, another executor who may be a Brāhmaṇa minister, and one person rewarded for faithful service who may be a commoner.

Figure 10 shows the representational profiles for these three types of dignitaries. As expected, each of the three profiles differs from the other two at least in some aspects. Most conspicuously, belligerence and prowess are fairly prevalent (at 9.3% and 12.7%) in the aristocratic profile, while being barely or not at all present in the other two kinds (under 3%). On the intellect axis, ministers stand out (at 17.4%), while the other two lag behind (under 5%). The bureaucrat type is most prominently characterised by morality (at no less than 35.2%) and prestige (22.5%). These latter two dimensions are still highly prevalent in the other two types, yet much less so than among bureaucrats.

I turn now to a one-by-one investigation of these three types of dignitaries, comparing each to two other subsets of people: to another focus group that may have some traits in common with the dignitary type under analysis, and to the combined set of dignitaries outside the type being examined. The dimension of entitlement is included in all these comparisons in order to retain the dodecagonal arrangement of dimensions in the spider charts, but since this dimension does not occur at all in dignitaries, it will not be discussed in this section.
<figure><img src="image_23.png" /><figcaption>Figure 10. Types of dignitaries. The dimensions, clockwise from top, are Prestige, Dominance, Belligerence, Prowess, Competence, Eminence, Intellect, Morality, Beneficence, Submission, Appeal, and Entitlement.</figcaption></figure>

### 3.5.1. Aristocrats

Figure 11 juxtaposes aristocratic dignitaries with other dignitaries and with sovereigns. Since most aristocrats belong to families that control domains of their own, the overall expectation in this comparison is that aristocrats would show a profile transitional between that of non-aristocrat dignitaries and that of sovereigns. This expectation is fulfilled in the dimensions of dominance, belligerence, competence, intellect, and morality. Aristocrats are closer to other dignitaries than they are to sovereigns in the dimensions of dominance (2.4% for
aristocrats, 1.1% for other dignitaries, against 11.4% for sovereigns) and competence (6.5% in aristocrats, 7.3% in non-aristocratic dignitaries, but only 5% in sovereigns). They are also on a par with other dignitaries in the dimension of eminence (17.9%), although here they stand highest by a small margin rather than in between the scores of non-aristocrats (16.9%) and sovereigns (9.3%). Aristocrats are, conversely, more akin to sovereigns than they are to other dignitaries in belligerence (9.3%, compared to 12% in sovereigns against 1.3% in non-aristocrats) as well as in intellect (3.7%, with sovereigns at 1.7% and non-aristocrats at 15.3%). As regards the prevalence of morality, aristocrats 815.3%) stand roughly halfway between sovereigns (7.1%) and other dignitaries (22%).

In the remaining dimensions, however, aristocrats are positioned well outside the bracket provided by sovereigns and non-aristocrat dignitaries. In the prevalence of prowess (12.7%) they have more lead on sovereigns (6.4%) than the latter do on the non-aristocratic dignitaries (2.7%). Simultaneously, however, submission too has a greater share of their traits (10.3%) than of those of other dignitaries (8.4%) or sovereigns (0.3%). Aristocrats are also more prevalently attributed qualities of appeal (5.8%) than either other dignitaries (2.4%) or sovereigns (2.3%). Conversely, aristocrats are least characterised by prestige (13.6% as opposed to 18% in non-aristocrats and 24.4% in sovereigns) and beneficence (2.8%, against 4.7% in other dignitaries and 6.6% in sovereigns).

The overall picture I make of this is that in the characterisation of aristocrats, individual aptitude is more relevant than for sovereigns, as the latter's suitability for the position is projected to be determined by birth into an entitled and dominant royal family. Individual aptitude or merit is expressed in the dimensions of competence, intellect, and eminence, as well as possibly by the appeal of their womenfolk.<fnref n="64" /> Aptitude is, simultaneously, on the whole less essential for aristocrats than for courtiers in an advisory or administrative function, who acquire and retain their posts primarily on account of their competence and intellect. Most of all, the aristocrat is portrayed as someone with great military might, manifest in the outstanding emphasis on prowess and nearly as much weight on belligerent acts as in sovereigns. As a check to this potentially disruptive power, however, the ideal aristocrat acquiesces to the sovereign's supremacy rather than asserting his own authority (either by main force, as in the dimension of dominance, or through ostentatious largesse, as in beneficence), and is content with a share of prestige carefully trimmed so as not to outshine

<footnote n="64">64 More than two thirds of the attributions of appeal in the set of aristocrats concern female targets. If women are excluded from the analysis (not illustrated), the appeal of aristocrats and sovereigns both stands at 2.2%, while that of non-aristocrat dignitaries is at 2.5%. The exclusion of women has very slight effect on the other dimensions in each profile.</footnote>
that of his overlord. His moral rectitude serves to guarantee his good behaviour, and includes an even greater share of proper conduct (21.1%) and honesty (23.9%) than shown above for dignitaries in general.

<figure><img src="image_24.png" /><figcaption>Figure 11. Aristocratic dignitaries compared to dignitaries as a whole and to sovereigns. The dimensions, clockwise from top, are Prestige, Dominance, Belligerence, Prowess, Competence, Eminence, Intellect, Morality, Beneficence, Submission, Appeal, and Entitlement.</figcaption></figure>

### 3.5.2. Ministers

Figure 12 compares ministers to other dignitaries and to ritualists (whose class also includes a small number of non-Brāhmaṇa people in a priestly function). Given that ministers are both Brāhmaṇas and courtiers, they can be expected to
exhibit a mix of the traits of these two groups, and to have scores in some dimensions that are transitional between other dignitaries and ritualists. This latter is indeed the case in all dimensions except for prestige and beneficence, but in most cases, ministers are much closer to one of the comparison groups than to the other.

In intellect, which is one of their most prominent traits at 17.4%, ministers score very close to halfway between non-minister dignitaries (3.7%) and ritualists (41.5%). The same applies at a much smaller scale to appeal, whose prevalence is 2.6% in ministers, much higher (5.2%) in non-ministers and much lower (0.8%) in ritualists.<fnref n="65" /> Morality is almost equally conspicuous in the characterization of the three groups; what little variation there is conforms to the expected pattern (ministers at 19.5%, non-ministers at 17.9%, ritualists at 20%). Ministers’ prestige is also quite prominent (17.1%), even more so than that of either non-ministers (14.7%) or ritualists (11.3%). They surpass the other two groups in beneficence as well, but all scores in this dimension are low ministers at 4.7%, the comparison groups (both below 3%). All three groups have similarly low scores in dominance (ritualists 1.1%, ministers 1.3%, and non-ministers 2%).

In belligerence and prowess, ministers are much more similar to ritualists than to non-minister dignitaries. Ritualists are entirely non-belligerent (0%) and have practically no prowess (0.3%<fnref n="66" />); ministers are only slightly above ritualists in this regard (belligerence 1.6%, prowess 2.6%), while both dimensions are decidedly present in other dignitaries (8% and 11.4% respectively). In the remaining dimensions, however, ministers are more akin to other dignitaries than to ritualists. Their competence, at 7.1%, is marginally more prominent than that of non-ministers (6.7%), but conspicuously less so than that of ritualists (10.2%). Eminence has great weight in the profile of ministers (17.1%) and a hair more in that of non-ministers (17.5%), but comes less to the fore among ritualists (10.2%). Similarly, submission is a valued trait in ministers (9%), and slightly more so in other dignitaries (9.7%), but quite irrelevant in ritualists (1.9%).

<footnote n="65">65 The high appeal of non-ministers, as noted above, is mostly thanks to the female satellites of aristocrats. If only males are included in the analysis, then ministers actually have slightly more appeal than non-ministers.</footnote>

<footnote n="66">66 The non-zero score is thanks to a single Brāhmaṇa described as fearless, *atrasta-manāh*. This man Paṇdiya was not a householder Brāhmaṇa, but someone who had undertaken an ascetic vow for the sake of Amma II (according to the *Paļaṁkalūru grant of Amma II*), so his “prowess” is in fact resolve in a non-martial context.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_25.png" /><figcaption>Figure 12. Brahmanical ministers compared to dignitaries as a whole and to ritualists. The dimensions, clockwise from top, are Prestige, Dominance, Belligerence, Prowess, Competence, Eminence, Intellect, Morality, Beneficence, Submission, Appeal, and Entitlement.</figcaption></figure>

The detailed comparison thus confirms what has already been indicated by Figure 10: ministers differ conspicuously from non-ministerial dignitaries — most of whom are military aristocrats — in their lack of belligerence and prowess, and in their abundance of intellect. The relatively high emphasis on intellect coupled with the low prevalence of belligerence and prowess renders their profile somewhat similar to that of ritualists. They, however, differ markedly from ritualists in the frequent appearance of submission in their descriptions, whereas the dependency of ritualists does not need to be articulated in their