371 
1871.] Rajendralala Mitra— On a Skanda Gupta Inscription. 
“ In the empire of Skanda Gupta,—the floor of whose audience chamber 
is swept by gusts from the bowing of heads of kings by hundreds ; who is 
sprung from the line of the Guptas ; of wide extended fame ; opulent beyond 
all others ; comparable with S'akra ; lord of hundreds of monarchs ;—the 
year one hundred and forty-one having passed away, and the month of 
Jaishthya arriving,” &c. 
It might be said that as the words bhukti and bhukta in the two 
inscriptions of King Hastin* are connected with the word rdjya , the same 
should be inferred in the case of the Kuhaon record. But the circumstan¬ 
ces under which the words occur are not the same, nor even similar. In 
the Kuhaon monument the s' ante stands as a participle distinct by itself, 
whereas in the Hastin records bhukti and bhukta are members of compound 
terms of which rdjya forms only a subordinate member; and as participle 
adjectives they further qualify the word samvatsara the counterpart of the 
Kuhaon varsha and not rdjya , and therefore they rather support my inference 
than oppose it. Gupta-nripa-rdjya-bhuktau and Qupta-nripa-rdjy a-bhukte 
simply mean “ during the dominancy of the Gupta kings for according to 
the usually received interpretation bhoya , when referring to years, implies its 
currency. Hastin evidently was a vassal of the Guptas and he satisfied 
himself with the title of Maharaja, whereas the Guptas always claimed to be 
Maharajadhiraja, and therefore there is no inconsistency in his avowing the 
supremacy. Mr. Fergusson may take exception to this, as in his scheme 
of Indian chronology he accepts the title Maharaja to be synonj^mous 
with emperor, and those who bore it to have been independent sovereigns ; 
but with scores of Maharajas who bow to the supremacy of our gracious 
sovereign Queen Victoria, and many of whom are not better than mere 
zamindars, none who is familiar with the history of India and of the 
ultra regal titles of the innumerable potentates who owned allegiance to 
the Pandus, will be disposed to follow his lead. 
Accepting the above arguments as correct, it is impossible to avoid the 
conclusion that Skanda Gupta was a reigning sovereign when the Kuhaon 
monument was put up, i. e., in the month of Jaishthya following the year 
141, or' the second month of 142 ; and as he could not under any human pro¬ 
bability extend his reign to one hundred and forty-six years, the conclusion 
becomes inevitable that the year of his reign refers to some, at the time, 
well-known era which needed no special specification. To say that the eras 
of the Kuhaon and the Indor monuments are different, and that consequent¬ 
ly the one hundred and forty-one years of the former was calculated from a 
* Ante XXX, pp. 6 and 10. General Cunningham informs me that he has another 
inscription of king Hastin, and one of his son, in which the word blvukti occurs under 
identically the same circumstances, but I have not yet seen them. 
