Indian Antiquary Vol 01

SR No.: 032493
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Jas Burgess
Publisher: Swati Publications
Publication Year: 1984
Total Pages: 430
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 22 MB

Page 150

128
THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.
[APRIL 5, 1872.
in the Mahabharat, and I should like to know more about the Shaiva dynasty, and its connection with the district of Dinajpur.
I think it quite possible that the original temple to Shiva, of which these are fragments, was erected, not in Dinajpur, but in Gauda, the capital of its founder, and that its fragments were thence brought by the Muhammadans who had a large frontier post at Ban-nagar, or thereabouts, not being in possession of the country to the north. One reason for thinking so would be that there is no tradition of any such great rája as the founder of this temple would be, or of any important personage between Báns and the Muhanımadan conquest. On the other hand, it is from Bán-nagar that the fragments have been distributed over the district of Dinajpur, and if it had been a Muhammadan, and not a Hindu building, which was there constructed of them, we should scarcely find, as we do, that the Muhammadans had plundered it for the decoration of the tomb of Sultan Shah. It appears to me possible that in Buchanan's time, 1805, tradition may have confused some Shive-worshipping Bán-raja, or “King of the Forest," with Bana of the Mahabharata, and that the date of the former may have been about A. D. 900, or not very long anterior to the Muhammadan oocupation. The absence of all written history renders such confusion possible. Then further explanation is required, why a king of Gauda, of the Kambojan race, should have set up a costly temple to Shiva at Bán-nagar, forty or fifty miles north-east from Gaur. Buchanan tells a curious story of a stone which lay in one of the sacred pools at Bán-nagar, and which was said to be a dead cow thrown in by the infidel Yavana, to pollute the water. He had it pulled out, and it proved to be an image of the bull Vrishabha, usually worshipped by the Shaivas. In another place he says that by the protection of Shiva, and the assistance of jungle fever, Bán-raja was enabled to repel the attacks of Krishna, who had a family quarrel with him, but that afterwards Krishna sent the Yavanas, eaters of beef, whom Buchanan believes to have been the Macedonians of Baktria, to attack Bána, and that they succeeded in defeating him, after defiling his sacred ponds by & bit of beef tied to the foot of a kite. This legend of the beef, and the other of the dead cow, correspond curiously with the fact of the finding in 1805 of the image of Vrishabha, and I think point very clearly to the overthrow of the worship of Shiva, and to its previous existence at Bán-nagar. Buchnan says that the story rests on the authority of one of the Puranas attributed to Vyása, and I find from Small's Handbook of Sanskrit Literature, that the earliest date ascribed to the Puranas is the 8th or 9th century, while some are as late as the 16th. If Babu Rajendralala Mitra's date is correct, the Shiva temple at Ban-nagar was erected, and presumably the worship of Shiva was at its height,
about A.D. 950, and the Muhammadan conquest was in A.D. 1203, or only 250 years later. The image of Vrishabha cannot have been allowed to remain dishonoured, while Shiva worshippers were in the ascendant, and therefore must have been pitched into the water after the erection of the great temple. Who, then, were the Yavanas to whom tradition points as having defeated the Shiva-worshippers, and thrown the image of the sacred bull into the water? Can the author of the Purána have so confused tradition as to indicate by the Yavans the Muhammadan conquerors ? or was there a conquest before that of the Muhammadans, and yet subsequent to A.D. 833 or A.D. 967, whichever date is selected for the Bannagar temple?
E. VESEY WESTMACOTT, Bengal Civil Service, Dinajpur.
Note on the above. Bábu Rájendralála gives no authority for taking ghat & as equivalent to threefold; and supposing that were its meaning, threefold eight' would be 24. But the instrumental varshena is a serious objection, I think, to his interpretation of kunjara-ghat &-varshena, -for if the last word of the compound meant the year, and the other two 888, varsha ought to be in the locative case. When a noun denoting time is in the instrumental case it indicates the period occupied in doing a thing (Pan. II. 3, 6), and thus the sense of the above expression, if it referred to time, would be the temple was constructed in 888 years, or at least that it took the 888th year to be constructed. But the construction is awkward, and if it represented a date the compound would be difficult to separate grammatically. I think the expression means he who pours forth an array of elephants', or, if the va is to be taken as dhawhich is not unlikely, the defier of the ranks of elephants.' Varshman o does not agree with the metre and is consequently inadmissible : besides the compound would be ungrammatical. The word has two forms varshma and varshman; if the former be taken, the final word of the nominative singular of the compound would be Varshmo, if the latter varshme, but in neither case varshman o, but even were it not 80—the meaning would be "a temple in which there are bodies or carcases of many elephants." The idiom of the language does not admit of such a word as “carved" being understood, except when a double sense is intended. R. G. BHANDARKAR.
Gonds and Kurkus.
Pardi, 24th Feb. 1872. I WOULD beg to offer a few remarks in reference to a notice of the hill tribes of Gonds and Kurkus, which appeared in the Indian Antiquary, pp. 54-56. I have given some account of these tribes in my Settlement Reports on the Baitul and Chindwará districts of the Central Provinces. Just now I wish