Krishna (Kanha) Satavahana

Krishna, called Kanha in the Prakrit of his time, was the second king of the Satavahanas, in the second century BCE.¹² He followed the founder Simuka, and the Puranas call him Simuka’s younger brother.¹ Very little is known of his reign. But one short inscription shows that the young kingdom already reached Nasik, in the western Deccan.³⁴⁵

In the Puranas

The Puranas give lists of the Andhra kings, as they call the Satavahanas.¹ In F. E. Pargiter’s translation they say that Simuka will reign 23 years, and that “his younger brother Krsna will next reign 10 years”.¹ The Matsya Purana gives him 18 years.¹

E. J. Rapson checked these lists against the inscriptions.² He found that the Puranas give the names and order of the first three kings correctly: Simuka, Krishna and Sri Satakarni.² He thought it probable that Krishna was Simuka’s brother, as the Bhagavata and Vishnu Puranas say.² That would explain why the great Nanaghat inscriptions of the family leave out his name.²

Robert Sewell’s list (1932), which follows Vincent Smith, also makes Krishna Simuka’s brother.⁶ It gives him 18 years from about 197 BCE.⁶

The Nasik inscription

A short inscription is cut on the upper sill of the right-hand window of Cave No. 19 at Nasik.³ É. Senart translated it: “Under king Krishna of the Satavahana family this cave has been caused to be made by the officer in charge of the Sramanas at Nasik.”³ Senart doubted some of the readings and called his translation hypothetical.³ He thought that the officer, following the example of Asoka, was charged with watching over the sramanas (monks) of the Nasik district.³

The scholar Georg Bühler dated the letters of this record to “the times of the last Mauryas or the earliest Sungas, in the beginning of the second century B.C.”.² Bühler also found that the letters of the Nanaghat inscriptions agree closely with it.²

Vincent Smith drew the main lesson. He wrote that the new dynasty grew so fast that Nasik was part of its lands in Krishna’s reign, and that those lands “thus stretched across India”.⁴⁵ Sewell likewise wrote that Krishna’s rule reached across India from the west of Kalinga to Nasik.⁶

Where the sources disagree

• His years. Pargiter’s text of the Puranas gives him 10 years, but the Matsya Purana gives 18.¹ Sewell gives 18.⁶
• The next king’s father. The Bhagavata and Vishnu Puranas apparently call Sri Satakarni the son of Krishna.² Rapson found this impossible to reconcile with the inscriptions.² See Sri Satakarni.

Footnotes

1. F. E. Pargiter (ed.), The Purana Text of the Dynasties of the Kali Age (1913), p. 71, translation and notes (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. E. J. Rapson, Catalogue of the Coins of the Andhra Dynasty, the Western Ksatrapas, the Traikutaka Dynasty, and the “Bodhi” Dynasty (1908), p. xix and n. 4 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

3. É. Senart, “The Inscriptions in the Caves at Nasik”, Epigraphia Indica VIII (1905–06), p. 93, No. 22 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

4. Vincent A. Smith, The Early History of India, 4th ed. (1924), p. 218 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩²

5. Smith, Early History of India (1924), p. 219 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩²

6. Robert Sewell, The Historical Inscriptions of Southern India (1932), p. 324 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴