Page:The Pālas of Bengal.djvu/25



For a long time after the Northern Indian campaign of Govinda III, the Rāṣṭrakūṭa, Bengal enjoyed immunity from Gurjara invasions. The Rāṣṭrakūṭas had barred the Gurjaras so effectively in their desert country, that for the next two or three generations, the Gurjara kings were obliged to remain content with their former boundaries. It was not till the reign of the Gurjara Emperor Bhoja I, Mihira or Ādivarāha, that we hear of a Gurjara invasion of Bengal. After his succession to the throne, Devapāla was engaged in several lengthy campaigns, and pushed his conquests as far as the Himalayas in the North and the Vindhya Hills in the South:—

He met with considerable success in his wars, and we find a corroboration of this statement in an inscription incised at the request of the grandson of his minister, Darbhapāṅi Miśra. The Badal pillar inscription records that "By his (Darbhapāṇi's) policy the illustrious prince Devapāla made tributary the earth as far as Revā's parent, whose pile of rocks are moist with the rutting juice of elephants, as far as Gauri's father, the mountain which is whitened by the rays of Īśvara's moon, and as far as the two oceans, whose waters are red with the rising and the setting of the sun":—

Ā Revā-janakān = mataṅgaja-madastimyac-chila-saṅghater = ā-gaurī-pitur = īśvarendu-kiranaiḥ puṣyat = sitimno gireḥ, ''Marttaṇḍās-tamay-oday-āruṇa-jalād-ā-vārirāśi-dvayān = nītyā yasya bhuvaṁ cakāra karadāṁ Śrī-Devapālo nṛpaḥ. — verse'' 5.

In the very same inscription another verse refers to the campaigns of the same king and mentions the names of his antagonists in detail. This verse has been assigned to Vigrahapāla I by Mahāmahopādhyāya Hara Prasāda Śāstrī, but in my humble opinion it refers to the king Devapāla, for the simple reason that the verse referring to Śūrapāla, the next king after Devapāla, according to the Badal pillar inscription, is placed after it. According to this inscription both Darbhapāṇi and his grandson Kedāramiśra were the contemporaries of Devapāla. Someśvara, the son of Darbhapāṇi and the father of Kedāramiśra, was