398 
[No. 4, 
Bajendralala Mitra —On the Tala 
Apparently disjointed as these facts are, they are of great importance 
in the elucidation of the date of the Sena Iiajas. To put them together, 
we have first in the Tarpandighi plate the 7th year of Lakshmana’s reign. 
In the Buddha Gaya inscription we have the 74th year of his era. Then 
we have in the Sadukti-karnamrita MS. some date which corresponded 
with the S'aka 1127=1205 A. I). Then comes the S'iva Siiiha inscription, 
dated in the 280th year of that king’s era. Then we have two MSS., one 
dated in the 459th year, and the other in the 484th of that era. And 
lastly we have the fact that the era is still current, and in the present 
year reckons 771. That the era is not a newly devised one, is abundantly 
evident from the fact of its having been in regular currency all along, and 
its present figure, therefore, gives us a very correct clue to its initial date. 
The pandits of Tirhut reckon the era to be a luni-solar one, commencing 
from the 1st of the lnni-solar month of Magha, and it must have therefore 
commenced in January 1106 A. D., or within three years of the date which 
I conjecturally assigned to Lakshmana Sena in my paper on the Sena 
Bajas. # This settles the date of Lakshmana Sena on infinitely more reliable 
data than what we have for any other Hindu sovereign of the pre- 
Muhammadan era. 
Beginning with 1106, Lakshmana had a very prosperous reign of many 
years, for his minister Halayudha informs us, in the preface to his Brah- 
mana Sarvasva, that he commenced service when verjr young as a court 
pandit, and was successively raised by the king to higher ranks, till he 
was made a minister when he had become old.f A period of 30 years 
would scarcely be too much for this, and Lakshmana’s reign may very 
fairly be assumed to have extended to the close of the fourth decade of the 
12th century. His immediate successors, Madhava Sena and Kesava Sena 
did not take up each two or three years, and the rest of the century was 
taken up by Lakshmaneya alias Asoka Sena, the Lakshmaniyd of Muham¬ 
madan writers. 
The name Asoka has puzzled many antiquarians. "With the vivid 
recollection of the name as that of the great patron of Buddhism, they 
have found it difficult to reconcile with it the idea of a Hindu bearing the 
name. But the word simply means “ griefless,” and there is nothing to 
prevent such a name being given to a Hindu. On the contrary, Hindu 
mothers and guardians often use terms indicative of immunity from pain, 
grief and the like ; and, in the case of a posthumous child which lost its 
mother immediately after its birth, a term implying that it would never have 
cause to mourn the loss of its parents, would by no means be inappropriate. 
With the close of Asoka Sena’s reign, the sovereignty of the Hindus 
in the delta passed to the Muhammadans; but the exact time when this 
* Ante, Yol. XXXIV, p. 139. f Ante, p. 138. 
