The Pandavleni Caves at Nashik Hold Ushavadata's Record of Free Boat Ferries on Six Rivers and Queen Gotami Balasiri's Record of Her Son Gautamiputra Satakarni Rooting Out the Kshaharatas

A hill about five miles from Nashik carries two long Prakrit inscriptions that record one change of power from opposite sides. In Cave 10, Ushavadata, son-in-law of the Kshatrapa (provincial ruler) Nahapana, lists what he paid for: rest-houses in four towns, wells, tanks and gardens, and free boat ferries across six rivers. In Cave 3, the Satavahana queen mother Gotami Balasiri has her son, King Gautamiputra Satakarni, praised for destroying the Kshaharata family, the line to which Nahapana belonged.

Prakrit was the everyday speech of the period, and both records are cut in Brahmi script. E. Senart of Paris edited them in 1905 to 1906 in volume 8 of Epigraphia Indica. Locally the caves are Pandu Lena, or Pandavleni. In the inscriptions the hill is Tiranhu, which Senart took to be Sanskrit Trirasmi.

A hill the inscriptions call Tiranhu

In 1883 the Bombay Gazetteer described three bare, steep hills about five miles south of Nashik. The highest and most easterly stands 1,061 feet (about 320 metres) above Nashik and 3,004 feet above the sea, and its caves are cut into a low scarp across the north face, roughly half way up. It gave the group a span of 250 BC to AD 600 and numbered the caves from west to east, up to XXIV. Fergusson and Burgess, writing in 1880, counted 17, set about 300 feet above the plain along a quarter of a mile of rock.

Numbers differ from book to book. The two caves in this piece carry the numbers Senart and the Gazetteer use, 3 and 10, which Fergusson and Burgess called III and VIII. Cave 10, in the Gazetteer’s description, is a hall with sixteen cells and a veranda. Cave 3 has a veranda with six eight-sided pillars topped by pairs of animals, among them elephants and bulls.

Trirasmi, or “Triple Beam of Light”, is a name the Gazetteer finds hard to explain. It suggests the three hills, or the pyramid shape of the cave hill, as the source.

What Ushavadata paid for

The long inscription on the veranda wall of Cave 10 names the donor as Ushavadata, son of Dinika and son-in-law of King Nahapana, the Kshaharata Kshatrapa. In Senart’s translation he is the giver of 300,000 cows, the giver of sixteen villages to gods and Brahmanas, and a man who has 100,000 Brahmanas fed each year. He gave gold and made a tirtha, a bathing place with steps down to the water, on the river Barnasa, which the Gazetteer takes to be the Banas of north Gujarat. Quadrangular rest-houses went up at Bharukachha (Broach), Dasapura, Govardhana and Sorparaga (Sopara), and he dug wells and tanks and laid out gardens. Senart could not identify Dasapura. Govardhana, the Gazetteer says, lies about six miles up the Godavari from Nashik.

Then come the ferries. Senart’s translation says he established “free ferries by boats” on the Iba, Parada, Damana, Tapi, Karabena and Dahanuka, and put up shelters on both banks of each. Senart reads them as meeting places and sheds for giving out drinking water. Bühler and Bhagwanlal, in the Gazetteer’s version, say he made the six rivers crossable by boats free of charge and read the second kind of shelter as slopes down to the water.

The Gazetteer matched the six names with rivers of the south Gujarat and north Konkan coast: the Ambika (possibly), the Par, the Damanganga, the Tapti, the Kaveri (probably) and the creek at Dahanu. Every one of them lies between Dahanu and Surat, it notes, and all but the Par need a ferry at least in the rains. That stretch of coast runs between Broach and Sopara, two of the towns where he built rest-houses. Both appear as ports in the Greek sailing guide covered in our piece on the Periplus.

A postscript in the first person adds a campaign. At the command of “the lord”, whom the Gazetteer takes to be Nahapana, Ushavadata went to relieve the chief of the Uttamabhadras, who had been besieged through the rainy season, and the besiegers fled at his approach. Senart reads the besiegers as Malayas and the Gazetteer prefers Malavas. From there the record takes him to the Pushkara tanks, which the Gazetteer places in Rajasthan, where he bathed and gave cows and a village. Senart’s translation gives 3,000 cows and the Gazetteer 300,000.

The inscription closes with the cave itself, cut in the Trirasmi hills with its cisterns. A cell in the same veranda is the gift of Dakshamitra, daughter of Nahapana and wife of Ushavadata. The Gazetteer observes that he gave as much to Brahmanas as to Buddhists, and the monks at Karla received a village from him too. Burgess and Bhagwanlal translated that Karle record in 1881, and our piece on the Karla caves covers the site.

Three thousand karshapanas with the weavers’ guilds

A second record, cut directly below, is dated to year 42, in the month of Vaishakha. Ushavadata gives the cave to the whole Sangha, the community of monks from the four quarters, together with a permanent fund of 3,000 karshapanas, which Sircar takes to be Nahapana’s silver coins. The money went to two weavers’ guilds at Govardhana: 2,000 at an interest of one pratika, a karshapana, on every hundred each month, and 1,000 at three-quarters of that rate. The capital was never to be repaid, and only the interest was spent.

Senart works the first rate out at 12 per cent a year. On that figure the 2,000 earns 240 karshapanas a year, the exact sum needed to give each of twenty resident monks 12 karshapanas for cloth, which the text names. According to the text, the gift was announced in the town hall and entered in the record office. Sircar, who re-edited the text in 1965, describes the weavers’ guilds as apparently like modern banking and trading corporations.

The queen mother’s list of conquests

Gotami Balasiri’s inscription is cut on the back wall of the veranda of Cave 3, above the entrance, and is dated to the 19th year of her grandson, King Pulumayi, son of Vasishthi. She is called the great queen and the mother of the king of kings Gautamiputra Satakarni. Most of the text praises her son.

Senart’s translation makes him king of Asika, Asaka, Mulaka, Suratha, Kukura, Aparanta, Anupa, Vidabha and Akara-Avanti, and lord of the Vindhya, Sahya, Malaya and Mahendra mountains among others. The praise includes “whose chargers had drunk the water of three oceans”. He humbled the pride of the Kshatriyas, destroyed the Sakas, Yavanas and Pahlavas, rooted out the Khakharata race and restored the glory of the Satavahana family. Rapson read Khakharata as a dialect form of Kshaharata, the name of the family of Bhumaka and Nahapana, and took the restoration of Satavahana glory to mean the reconquest of western territory the Kshaharatas had seized. Setting the list of places beside Ushavadata’s gifts, he judged how much land changed hands.

The text is praise-poetry, and it also likens his prowess to Rama, Kesava, Arjuna and Bhimasena. What lets a reader check the Kshaharata claim is other evidence. Rapson found no reason to doubt that the boast was literally true.

Balasiri had the cave made on the top of Tiranhu, which the text likens to the top of Kailasa, and gave it to the Bhadayaniya monks, a branch of the Sthaviras according to Senart. Her grandson granted the village of Pisajipadaka for its upkeep.

Gautamiputra’s own order of year 18

Gautamiputra left a record in the same cave, an order from his victorious camp at Vejayanti, which Rapson identifies with Banavasi, to the officer at Govardhana, dated to his 18th year. A field of 200 nivartanas, a land measure, in the village of Western Kakhadi is to go to the ascetics of Tiranhu. Senart’s translation says Ushavadata had previously enjoyed it. The field is exempt from entry by royal officers, from salt digging and from interference by district police.

Scholars read the order in three ways. Bühler and Bhagwanlal took the word ajakalakiya to mean “until today”, so that the order would date the conquest and imply the removal of Ushavadata. Senart judged it a place name and doubted that reading, while Rapson took the sense as “up to the present time” but concluded the order probably confirmed, under the new dynasty, a gift Ushavadata had already made. The same pattern appears, in his view, in an order at Karla, its date partly lost, which confirms the monks in a village Ushavadata had given them.

The last dated order of Gautamiputra at Nashik is of year 24, issued with the queen mother. A field the king had earlier given had gone untilled and its village was empty, so he replaced it with 100 nivartanas of royal land at the edge of the town.

The coins that fix the order

In 1906 a hoard of some 13,250 silver coins turned up near the village of Jogalthembi in Nashik district. Rapson, who catalogued a selection for the British Museum, found it held only coins of Nahapana and coins of Nahapana restruck by Gautamiputra, the second kind making up more than two-thirds. Shimada, citing H. R. Scott’s study of 1908, gives 9,270 restruck out of 13,270.

The new stamps are Satavahana designs, a caitya (relic shrine) with an inscription on one side and the Ujjain symbol on the other. Rapson says these types were used only to reissue the existing currency. The restriking, he judged, would would naturally follow soon after Nahapana’s defeat, and the coins circulated in the Nashik district, which Gautamiputra had won or, in Rapson’s words, reclaimed.

Before the hoard, Fergusson and Burgess had judged from the architecture that a century might separate the two kings, and left the interval to later study. Gautamiputra restriking Nahapana’s silver put them in the same generation.

Other donors on the hill

The donors on Tiranhu were not all royal. Cave 17 carries the gift of Indragnidatta, son of Dhammadeva, a Yavana and a northerner from Dattamitri, who had a cave, a chaitya (a shrine with a stupa) and cisterns made for the merit of his parents and gave them to the Sangha with his son Dhammarakhita. Senart reports that Bühler and Bhandarkar conjectured Dattamitri to be Demetrias in Arachosia, a town named by Isidore of Charax. The Gazetteer placed the town near Sind.

Two chronologies

The records give regnal years, not years of the Christian era, so every calendar date rests on a chain of arguments. The sequence is firm and the numbers are not.

Nahapana’s dated inscriptions run from year 41 to year 46. Fergusson and Burgess read them as Saka-era years, counted from AD 78, and reached about AD 118 to 120. In 1908 Rapson did the same and put Nahapana’s last known date, year 46, at AD 124. Gautamiputra’s 18th year he set at the same date, which makes Gautamiputra’s accession about AD 106 and his 24th and last recorded year AD 130. Sircar’s edition gives Nahapana as about AD 119 to 124. Some scholars, Sircar notes, read the years in the Vikrama era and put Nahapana much earlier, and he rejects that on letter forms and on the evidence of Gautamiputra’s inscriptions and coins. The 1883 Gazetteer had listed estimates for Gautamiputra’s defeat of Nahapana from about AD 100 (Oldenberg) to AD 319 (Bhandarkar).

Newer work moves both kings earlier. Shimada summarises the case in his 2013 book. The Periplus, which a reference to the Nabataean king Malchus dates securely to about AD 40 to 70, names a ruler of the Barygaza coast, Nambanus in Schoff’s spelling and Mambanos in Shimada’s, whom most scholars identify with Nahapana. If that is right, his reign began before AD 78 and his years cannot be Saka-era years. Metal tests by Seeley and Turner found Nahapana’s silver coins to be 98.16 per cent silver, close to Roman denarii struck before Nero debased the coinage in AD 63.

Joe Cribb argued from Nahapana coins restruck by the Indo-Parthian king Sasan, whose rule is placed at about AD 20 to 45, that Nahapana ruled in the middle of the first century. Shailendra Bhandare dates Nahapana to about AD 32 to 78 and Gautamiputra to about AD 60 to 85. Shimada writes that these studies do not fix the dates exactly, and his own book takes about AD 50 to 60 as the start of the later Satavahanas, against Rapson’s AD 106 for Gautamiputra’s accession.