Page:The Pālas of Bengal.djvu/23

Rh the campaign of Dharmmapāla and Govinda III against Nāgabhaṭa II, the Pāla and Rāṣṭrakūṭa kings fell out and in the struggle which ensued Dharmmapāla was defeated. This must have taken place after the defeat of Nāgabhaṭa II by the confederate armies:—

Kerala-Mālava-Gauḍān = sa-Gurjjarā[ṁ]ś = Citrakūṭagiridu[r]-ggasthān baddhvā Kāñcīśān = atha sa Kīrttinārāyaṇo jātaḥ.

Dharmmapāla must have reigned for at least thirty-two years as his Khalimpur grant is dated in that year. Tārānātha says that he ruled for sixty-four years, which is impossible as we shall see in the following pages. The late Dr. Kielhorn was also of opinion that Dharmmapāla had a long reign. In the Monghyr grant it is stated that Dharmmapāla married the daughter of the Rāṣṭrakūṭa chief Parabala, a lady named Raṇṇādevi. Recently Dr. Kielhorn has published an inscription found on a pillar at Pathari, in the Native State of Bhopal in Central India. According to this inscription a king of the Rāṣṭrakūṭas named Parabala was reigning in the Vikrama year 917 = 861 A.D. This Parabala is most probably the father-in-law of Dharmmapāladeva. So if Parabala married his daughter to the Pāla king, the latter must have had reigned for a very long time. Parabala and his father were very long-lived men. His father Karkarāja defeated a king named Nāgāvaloka, who was a contemporary of Chāhamāna Guvāka I of Sākambharī and one of whose grants is dated in the year 813 of the Vikrama era = 756 A.D. Dharmmapāla had a son named Tribhuvanapāla, who is mentioned in the Khalimpur grant as the dūtaka, and who seems to have died during the lifetime of his father as Dharmmapāla was succeeded by his second son Devapāladeva after a reign of about forty years.

No coins of Dharmmapāla have been discovered as yet, and the only other inscription of Dharmmapāla besides the Khalimpur grant is a small votive inscription of the 26th year of his reign, found at Bodh-Gaya in the Gaya district of Bengal. The sculpture, on which the inscription has been incised, was removed to the Indian Museum in 1895 when Mr. Broadley's collection of antiquities was sent to Calcutta by the order of the Government of Bengal. The inscription was published in 1908 by Pandit Nilmoni Chakravartti, Professor of Pali and Sanskrit in the Presidency College, Calcutta. It records the erection of a four-faced Mahādeva in a place called Campaśāyatana, by a man named Keśava, the son of a sculptor named Ujvala, and the excavation of a tank at the cost of three thousand drammas, in the 26th regnal year of Dharmmapāla. His Khalimpur grant was issued from Pāṭaliputra. It is well known that he is the king of Bengal repeatedly referred to in the Rāṣṭrakūṭa and Gurjara records. In the Monghyr grant of his son Devapāla, Dharmmapāla's followers are said to have bathed at Kedāra, and at the mouth of the Ganges during his expeditions, and this bears out the statements made in the