DDK HistoryF.p65 - CSIR

8.1] KHARAVELA 245
large wars, which arose from deep economic causes. The military
feats, including the recovery from the Magadhan king Bahasatimita
(perhaps a Sunga Brhaspati-mitra, or Pusya-mitra) of a Jain relic taken
away by Nanda, king of Magadha (103 or 300 years earlier) are of the
standard type. So also, feeding innumerable Jain arhats and brahmins.
The construction of temples and excavation of over a hundred caves (many
of which have been found) is mentioned. The remarkable feature is
that the total expenditure is given for each set of public works, in
hundreds of thousands of panas; the coins were debased, but the
amounts remain considerable, nevertheless. Perhaps the most interesting
performance in this epigraph, whose readings and interpretation have
been disputed endlessly (I follow B. M. Barua, Old Brdhmi
inscriptions of the Udayagiri and Khandagiri caves, Calcutta 1929)
is the extension at great cost of an ancient canal from the Tosali (?) road.
The canal had been originally dug by King Nanda, which shows that,
even before Asoka and the Mauryans, the Magadhan kings had pushed
regular settlements towards Kalinga. But Kharavela drained the ‘Dismal
Swamp’ (timira-daha) into the Langala river, after 113 years of growth,
which shows—with his extensive repairs to reservoirs and embankments,
that regular cultivation had come to stay in Kalinga. Yet his memory
was completely lost.
Kharavela’s raid on Magadha must have been made at about the
time of the first Sunga monarch Pusyamitra, who had succeeded the
last Mauryan by assassination, but could not rule the whole empire.
The family had held the viceroy-ship at Ujjain or the neighbouring
province Vidisa under the Mauryans. The name sunga is a recognized
brahmin (Bharadvaja) gotra, and has been taken to. denote that the
dynasty was brahmin. This seems unlikely. The fcsatriya and vaiSyas still
had gotras, at this time. The extensive trade, migrations, and raids of the
times, absorption of new people, meant that the old gotra system would
disappear except among the brahmins, who remained conservative in form.
The old vedic custom of adopting the brahmin into the Aryan tribe
meant the creation of a new gotra, usually the same as that of the
tribal chief at whose sacrifices the brahmin officiated.