[APRIL 5, 1872.

THE INDIAN ANTIQUARY.

128

in the Mahābhārat, 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 Bán-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 rāja as the founder of this

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 2 or

temple would be, or of any important personage between Bána and the Muhammadan conquest. On the other hand, it is from Bán-nagar that the

was there a conquest before that of the Muham

fragments have been distributed over the district

nagar temple?

madans, - and yet subsequent to

of Dinajpur, and if it had been a Muhammadan, and

not a Hindu

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, tra dition may have confused some Shiva-worshipping Bán-raja, or “King of the Forest,” with Bána of the Mahābhārata, and that the date of the former

may have been about A. D. 900, or not very long anterior to the Mnhammadan occupation. The ab sence 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

E. VESEY WESTM Acott, Bengal Civil Service, Dinajpur. Note on the above.

building, which was there

constructed of them, we should scarcely find, as we

A.D. 833 or

A.D. 967, whichever date is selected for the Bān

Bābu Rijendralāla gives no authority for taking gh a fi as equivalent to threefold; and supposing that were its meaning, ‘threefold eight' would be 24.

But the instrumental v a r s h en a is a

serious objection, I think, to his interpretation of k un jar a-gh a t à-v a r s h ena, for if the last word of the compound meant the “ year, and the other two 888, v a r s h a ought to be in the loca tive 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,'

which was said to be a dead cow thrown in by the

or at least that it took the 888th year to be con structed. But the construction is awkward, and if it represented a date the compound would be difficult to separate grammatically. I think the

infidel Yavans, to pollute the water.

He had it

expression means “he who pours forth an array of

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

elephants', or, if the va is to be taken as dha which is not unlikely,– the defier of the ranks

lay in one of the sacred pools at Bán-nagar, and

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 a bit of beef tied to the foot of a kite. This legend of the beef, and the other of the dead cow, corres pond 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. Buch nan says that the story rests on the authority of one of the Purānas attributed to Vyāsa, and I find from Small's Handbook of Sanskrit Literature, that the earliest date ascribed to the Purānas 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 Bán-nagar was erected, and pre sumably the worship of Shiva was at its height,

of elephants.' V a r s h m an o does not agree with the metre and is consequently inadmissible : besides the compound would be ungrammatical. The word has two forms v a r s h m a and v a r s h m an : if the former be taken, the final word of the nomi native singular of the compound would be v a r s h m o, if the latter v a r s h m fi, but in neither case v a r s h m an o, but even were it not so—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 dis tricts of the Central Provinces.

Just now I wish