Page images
PDF
EPUB

Miscellaneous Contributions.

I. Ins cription of Udayasri (Patna Museum)
By N. G. Majumdar, B. A.
II. The Janibigha Inscription and Bisapi Grant
By H. Panday, B.A.

III. Purushottama Deva, King of Orissa

...

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

By Tarini Charan Rath, B.A.
IV. Copper Smelting Apparatus at Rakha

By C. Olden, Superintendent, Cape Copper Com-
pany, Limited.

[ocr errors]

143-144

145

[ocr errors]

146-149

150-151

Notes of the Quarter.

I. Proceedings of a Meeting of the Council held on the 152-153 25th January 1919.

II. Proceedings of a Meeting of the Council held on the 154-156 25th March 1919.

III. Annual Report of the Council... 157-164 IV. Minutes of the Annnal General Meeting held on the 165-170

29th March 1919.

VOL. V.]

JOURNAL

BIHAR AND ORISSA
RESEARCH SOCIETY.

OF THE

Progress the Society.

[PART J.

Annual Address.

By His Honour Sir E. A. Gait, K.C.S.I., C.I.E., President of the Society.

GENTLEMEN

It is a great pleasure to meet you again at the end of the fourth year of our Society's existence and to be able to congratulate you once

of

more on

its continued progress and prosperity and on the tangible results which have been achieved in various directions. The number of members of all kinds is now only 257 against 367 a year ago, but the falling off is nominal rather than real. It is due to the removal from the roll of a number of members who, though they had joined the Society and received the Journal regularly, never paid their subscriptions and were therefore a source of loss to us rather than gain. On the other hand 28 new members have joined the society. Our library now contains nearly 1,400 volumes. It has been enriched during the year by the purchase inter alia of 200 volumes of well-known editions of Sanskrit texts.

B.S

The Society's
Journal.

The Journal has continued to appear with fair regularity. It has maintained the reputation which it had already ained, and I have more than once received gratifying letters from England telling me of the interest which some of the papers published in it have aroused amongst European savants. This is specially the case in regard to several papers by our talented Honorary Secretary, Mr. K. P. Jayaswal, who is rapidly making a name for himself as an investigator and epigraphist.

The March number of the Journal contains a paper by him on the chronology of the Brihadratha dynasty of Magadha. From a close examination of the Matsya, Vayu and other Purānas, Mr. Jayaswal concludes that there were fifteen kings of this line before the Mahabharata (in which great war Sahadeva of that line fought and fell) and twenty-seven after, the whole dynasty reigning for one thousand years and the last twenty-seven for seven hundred (or more accurately 697) years until 727 B.C., when they were succeeded by the Saiśunaka dynasty.

Under the heading "Revised Notes on the Brahman Empire" Mr. Jayaswal deals with various questions concerning the Sunga dynasty, which Pushya-Mitra founded about 187 B.C. after another Brihadratha, the last of the Mauryas, whose general he was, had been assassinated in the sight of the whole army. Mr. Jayaswal supports, and gives evidence to confirm, Mahamahopadhyaya Hara Prashad Shastri's view that the Sungas were Brahmans. He thinks that the revolution was the result of a Hindu reaction against Buddhism and of dissatisfaction with Brihadratha's inaction in the face of Menander's GræcoBactrian invasion. The rise to power of the Sunga dynasty was followed by a general persecution of the Buddhists and the revival of orthodox Hinduism. It was a period of great literary activity, and to it is to be ascribed the compilation of the Mahabhashya and the Manava-Dharma-Sastra and the Brahmanical redactions of the great epics of the Mahabharata and the Rāmāyaṇa. The overweening claims put forward in these works

History and
Geography.

on behalf of the Brahmans, and the hostility therein displayed to the Sūdras, are explained by the fact that a Brahman dynasty was in power and that it had displaced a line of Sūdra kings.

Mr. Panna Lall has discussed the chronology of the Gupta Emperors on the basis of the dates assigned to two of them in two inscriptions on images of Buddha discovered recently at Sarnath near Benares in the course of excavations made by the Archæological Survey of India. He comments on the paucity of coins of Buddha Gupta, who is now known to have ruled over the whole country from Malwa to Bengal from 477 to 491 A.D. and urges that the members of our Society should make a systematic search in the bazars for such coins.

Mr. Jadunath Sarkar who, in the first volume of our Journal, gave an account of Mir Jumla's invasion of Assam based on that contained in the Fathiyya-i-ibriyya of Shihabuddin Talish, has contributed some notes on the Topography of Garhgaon which was then the Assam Capital. These notes should be very useful to local antiquarians. The same gentleman has compiled from the old factory records and original correspondence preserved in the In lia Office a narrative of the relations between Sivaji and the English of the Rajapur factory in the Ratnagiri district of Bombay during the period from 1659 to Sivaji's death in 1680. The Rajapur factory was closed about two years later.

Mahāmahopadhyaya Pandit Hara Prashad Shastri, on whose election as President of the Asiatic Society of Bengal I take this opportunity to offer him publicly, as I have already done privately, my most hearty congratulations, has continued to send valuable contributions to our Journal. The March number contains an instructive paper by him on Gazetteer Literature in Sanskrit. He reviews the information of this nature contained in (1) the Brahmakhanda of the Bbaviṣya Purana; (2) Vidyapati's account written in the fifteenth century of the countries visited by Balarama, Śri Kriṣṇa's elder brother, in the course of his expiatory tour; (3) and (4) the Vikramasagara, by some member of the Vaija la family, and the Pandava

digvijaya by Ramakavi, both more than three centuries old, and finally (5) the Desavali vivṛili, written by a learned Brahman named Jagamohan, whose patron Deva Vijala, a Chauhan Jagirdar of four parganas round Patna, died in the year 1650 A.D. The last mentioned, which is by far the least incomplete, purports to give an account of the fifty-six countries (almost all in India) which comprised the world as then known to the Hindus. Unfortunately no complete copy of the manuscript has yet been found.

The same learned Pandit contributed to the June number papers on three more Orissa copper-plates. The

Epigraphy. first, of unknown provenance, is now in the possession of the Yuvarajā of Tekkali. It dates probably from the eleventh century but the record is incomplete, as at least two plates are missing. The name of the donor is on a missing plate, but he seems to have been a member of the Sailodbhava family of Kōngada in Kalinga. The princes of this family were not always independent rulers; and in the seventh century they owed allegiance to Śusānkā, king of West Bengal.

The second plate is a grant of Ranastambhadeva of the Sulki family, whose land grants are already well known, no less than five having been published by the Fandit in the third volume of our Journal. The present inscription does not add materially to our knowledge of the dynasty, which ruled about the tenth century, but an interesting question is suggested by the fact that the land granted was in the village of Jara in the Radha country. There is a village of this name in the Hooghly district on the border of Midnapore. The latter district contains an influential agricultural community krown as Sukli, who trace their origin to a place called Kodālaka, and the question is whether there is any connection between these names and the Sulki kings whose capital was at Kodālaka.

The third plate bears record of a grant by Ranabhañja-deva, of the line of Virabhadra, who is said to have been hatched out from the egg of a peahen, and whose dynasty ruled the country now forming the Mayurbhanj State. The plate was found by some cowherds in the Bamanghați subdivision of that State.

« PreviousContinue »