392 
Bajendralala Mitra —On the Pala 
[No. 4, 
Mungher plate Deva-pala. In the Dinajpur plate it is illegible. It ap¬ 
pears, however, from the first record that Vak-pala was the younger brother 
of Dharma-pala, and served as a lieutenant to his brother. The second record 
in giving the succession of the reigning sovereign, did not, therefore, feel called 
upon to name him. In the third record I think the illegible name which 
Colebrooke could not read and the next name Jaya-pala are not names of 
reigning sovereigns, but epithets of Dharma-pala, which have been mistaken 
for proper names. The word pala ‘ a protector’ is just one of those which 
a Hindu poet would most likely play upon in a variety of ways, and try to 
educe as many alliterations out of it as possible, and as Colebrooke says, 
“ so great a part of the inscription is obliterated, (portions of every line being 
illegible) that it is difficult to discover the purport of the inscription,”* 
such a mistake was not at all unlikely to happen. If the illegible name be 
assumed to be Deva-pala, the son of Vak-pala and successor of Dharma-pala, 
we could not make Jaya-pala his son, for the Bhagalpur plate makes Jaya-pala 
the son of Vak-pala and brother of Deva-pala, and Vigraha-pala his son. The 
Budal pillar names Sura-pala only, leaving out Vigraha-pala, but as the object 
of the pillar was not to give a genealogical table of the kings of the Pala 
dynasty, but to record the names of the ancestors of one Gfurava, the minister 
of Narayana-pala, naming the kings incidentally as patrons of those ances¬ 
tors, the omission is not remarkable. The Dinajpur plate names only one 
person between Deva-pala and Narayana-pala, and his name is illegible. 
We may reasonably assume it to have been Vigraha-pala. 
The sixth name in the Bhagalpur plate has not its counterpart in any 
other record. Its absence from the Mungher plate is accounted for by the 
fact of the latter not extending beyond Deva-pala ; and from the Budal plate, 
on the supposition of the owner of it not having been a patron of the 
family to whose honour it was dedicated. It should have been present in 
the Dinajpur plate, but as the entirety of that document is not forthcom¬ 
ing, it is impossible to say precisely whether there is only one name 
illegible in it after Deva-pala, or two. 
Leaving out of consideration the lists of the Ain i Akbari and of Tara- 
nath, which are unreliable and quite irreconcilable, we have only the Dinaj¬ 
pur plate to supply the names of the descendants of Narayana-pala down to 
Mahi-pala, and it gives us four names viz., Baja-pala, —pala, Vigraha- 
pala and Mahi-pala, which we must accept as correct pending the discovery of 
some more authentic document. I accept the Naya-pala and Vigraha-pala 
II. on the same authority, with Sthira-pala and Vasanta-pala as their aliases 
on the testimony of the Benares stone. 
In addition to the above there are four other names in inscriptions, 
each giving a single name ; but as there is nothing reliable to show the order 
* As. Researches, IX, p. 434. 
