________________ 192 Homage to Vaisali Pratisthana City): and he appealed to Uttama for her recovery; Uttama did this service and the abductor Valaka became his friend. In the meanwhile, his own banished wife was abducted by a Naga king, Kapotaka, to 'Patala' regions (apparently the Ganges delta), where however she was saved by the Naga king's daughter, Nanda, who concealed her and feigned being struck with dumbness, in the interests of the Queen, her mother. With the help of Valaka, Uttama now rescued Behula, who fully responded to her husband's love, and the pair continued to enjoy the favour of the Naga princess Nanda, who blessed their son, the famous 'Auttami or the second Manu'.1 In the same line of Uttanapada there was a prince, Anamitra, and bis wife Giri-bhadra, whose son, Ananda, was in childhood changed for the infant son named Caitra of another neighbouring prince, Vikranta, would rather mean the Sarasvati flowing into Prayaga and the Drsadvati or 'stone-bearing' Gandaki;--there was also a Sarasvati beside Vaisali. Utpalavata is now a ruined fort on the Ganges, said to represent the ruins of the city of Uttapapada. Some identify it with Bithur, 14 miles from Cawnpore, which is also called Utpalaranya (but this may be different from Utpalavata).Utpalaranya was also the name of Valmiki's asrama where Lava and Kusa were born, which was however at the junction of Tamasa (Tons) and the Ganges below Pratisthana (Allahabad). This Utpalaranya might represent Uttanapada's Utpalavata better. According to Mahabharata: V. P., Utpalaranya was within the kingdom of Pancala then. The Ramaganga river is known as Uttanika after him, and it falls into the Ganges at the Utpalaranya near Kannauj. These details, tersely summarised bere, indicate that the lower Gangetic country (from Allahabad to the sea) in those days was inhabited in the west by a very handsome 'raksasa' race and in the east by an equally handsome 'Naga' race, amongst which latter the ruling families evinced matriarchal traces. The names Behula (colloq. form of Vidhura' or <<Virabini', 'the separated maid') and Kapotaka are strongly reminiscent of the Bengal legends re Behula and the Nagas,-and of the Bengal river named Kapotak (one of the branches of the Deltaic Ganges, in Jessore district, on which the famous Michael Madhusudan Dutt's home village stood, and where in archaic times the great sage Kapila lived).
