1865.] On the Sena Rdjds of Bengal. 137 



tion owing as much to the names of Su Sena Noujib and a second 

 Lakshmana not occurring in any authentic early document, as to there 

 being no sufficient time available between the dates of Ballala Sena 

 and that of the Mahomedan conquest for the allocation of three reigns, 

 after making the necessary allowance for Lakshmana, Madhava and 

 Kesava Senas and Lakhmaniya, It is possible that those reigns were 

 only of a few months' duration each, but there is nothing authentic to 

 support such a theory, and therefore, I feel fully justified in the assump- 

 tion I have made above. 



The inscriptions are very unsatisfactory on the subject of elates. 

 The Bakerganj plate professes to have been recorded in the month of 

 Jaishta in the third year of the king's reign, but does not name any cur- 

 rent era. The Rajashahi stone has no date whatever. But it is not 

 difficult to find the probable time when the different members of the 

 Sena dynasty flourished in Bengal. According to the author of the 

 Samaya Prakds'a, the Ddnasdgara was written (or completed ?) in the 

 S'akayear 1019* = A. D. 1097. Ballala must therefore have lived at 

 about the end of the eleventh century, and this accords well with the 

 statement of the Ayin Akbary which makes that prince commence his 

 reign in the year 1066. Lakshmana, according to Abul Fazel, assumed 

 the sovereignty of Bengal in 1116, which gives a period of 51 years to 

 Ballala. I doubt, however, the accuracy of the last date. The date 

 of Bakhtiar's conquest of Bengal is well known (1203), and the 

 testimony of Minhajuddin regarding the eighty years' reign of 

 Lakshmaniya cannot be easily set aside. This carries us back to 1123. 

 On the other side if we allow only three years to Ballala after the 

 completion of his Danasagara we come to the end of the 11th century, 

 leaving only 23 years between 1101 and 1123 for distribution among 

 Lakshamana, Madhava and Kesava. The exact period of Laksmana's 

 reign is not known. Abul Fazel allots to him only 8 years, but Halay- 

 udha, his prime minister, suggests a much longer time. He says that 

 he was in his boyhood made a court pandit, by the king ; that in his 

 early manhood, he attained to the rank of a minister ; and that 



