Rudrapurushadatta

Rudrapurushadatta is the fourth king of the Ikshvakus of the lower Krishna valley to be known by name. The excavators of Nagarjunakonda announced his discovery in their report for 1955–56.¹ He is known from a single inscription found there.²³ Sircar and Krishnan also assigned to him a record at Gurzala.²³

The memorial pillar of Varmabhatta

The inscription is cut on a pillar from the excavators’ Site 13, now in the Nagarjunakonda Museum.² Above it is a worn carving of a seated lady with attendants.² The excavators took the scene to show Mahaprajapati Gotami holding the infant Buddha.⁴ Sircar and Krishnan saw it instead as the dead queen herself grooming, with a mirror in her hand and clothes that they took to be foreign.³

The Prakrit text has nine lines. It is dated in the 11th year of King Vasithiputa Siri-Rudapurisadata, on the eighth day of the first fortnight of spring.²⁵ It records the chhaya-khambha, a memorial pillar bearing an image, of the dead queen Varmabhatta (Vammabhata).²⁵

The text traces her place in the royal house through four generations of kings.³⁵ She was the granddaughter-in-law of Chamtamula, the daughter-in-law of Virapurushadatta, the wife of Ehuvula Chamtamula and the mother of the reigning king. The three earlier kings are given the title svami (lord).³⁵ The excavators connected this title with the Kshatrapas of western India.⁴

Varmabhatta was the daughter of a Saka Mahakshatrapa (great satrap) and belonged to the Brihatphala clan (gotra).³ Sircar and Krishnan took this as a second marriage link between the Ikshvakus and the Western Kshatrapas.³ The first was Virapurushadatta’s marriage to a princess of Ujjain.³ They also took it as the first evidence that those Sakas claimed the Brihatphala clan.³ Because the king’s metronymic Vasithiputa points to a mother of the Vasishtha clan, they concluded that Varmabhatta was his stepmother, not his mother.³

The excavators’ report also named a king Srivarman of the Brihatphala clan as having raised the pillar.⁴³ Sircar and Krishnan found no such person in the inscription.⁴³

Name and the Gurzala record

Gurzala lies a few miles east of Nagarjunakonda. An inscription of the 4th regnal year from there names a king Rulapurisadata. Sircar and Krishnan identified him with this king, on the grounds of script, findspot and name. They suggested that the spellings with d and with l in the first syllables were two attempts to write the Sanskrit name Rudrapurushadatta in Prakrit, under Dravidian influence.³⁵

Date

Sircar placed Rudrapurushadatta’s reign after the long reign of his father. He equated his father’s inscription in the cyclic year Vijaya with 333–34. He suggested that Rudrapurushadatta’s rule ended sometime before about 350.⁶ In his view the Pallava conquest of the Krishna–Guntur region followed about the middle of the 4th century.⁶ The years shown on this site are an approximation based on that suggestion and on his known 11th year.

Footnotes

1. A. Ghosh (ed.), Indian Archaeology 1955–56: A Review (1956), p. 23 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩

2. D. C. Sircar and K. G. Krishnan, “Two Inscriptions from Nagarjunikonda”, Epigraphia Indica XXXIV (1961–62, publ. 1963), p. 20 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

3. Sircar and Krishnan, “Two Inscriptions from Nagarjunikonda” (1963), p. 21 and notes (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³

4. Indian Archaeology 1955–56: A Review (1956), p. 24 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. Sircar and Krishnan, “Two Inscriptions from Nagarjunikonda” (1963), p. 22, text (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

6. D. C. Sircar, “More Inscriptions from Nagarjunikonda”, Epigraphia Indica XXXV (1963–64), p. 6 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩²