2 SO 
F. S. Growse —The town of Bul/mduhahr. 
[No 3, 
When that city was taken by Chandra Deva, the founder of the Rahtor 
dynasty, about 1050 A. D., Anang Pal II retired to Delhi and there 
established himself. But at the beginning of the eleventh century, 
Hara-datta, the Raja of Baran, though nominally a feudatory of Kanauj, 
appears to have been the virtual sovereign of all the country now included 
in the districts of Aligarh, Bulandshahr, Meratk and Delhi, with parts 
of Muradabad, Mathura and Eta. 
His name is still perpetuated by Hapur, a corruption of Hara-pur, 
now the head-quarters of the Stud Depot, of which town he is the tradi¬ 
tional founder, and all the fragments of stone sculpture that have been 
discovered at Bulandshahr may be assigned to bis time. As might have been 
expected from its nearness to Delhi, the Muhammadans have made a clean 
sweep of the district and razed to the ground every building, secular or 
religious, that had been erected by its former Hindu rulers. I have been 
over every part of it, but the sum total of all the antiquities I have been able 
to collect may be very briefly enumerated. An unusually lofty column 
is one of a pair that were dug up in some low ground at the entrance to 
the town from the Chola Railway Station. Though long since brought 
under cultivation, the field is still called ‘ the Sarovar, ’ and is the tradi¬ 
tional site of a large masonry tank which Hara-datta is said to have 
constructed. The companion column is at Mirath, where it was sent 
by the Sardar Bahadur, into whose hands it had come, and has been 
worked up into a house he has built there. The one now in my pos¬ 
session I rescued from his stables, where it had been thrown on the 
ground and was used by his grass-cutters to sharpen their tools on. Six 
short pillars of the same period were found buried under the steps of a 
small mosque on the highest part of the old town. In digging the 
foundations of a house on the opposite side of the same street I recovered 
a curious stone, sculptured with a representation of three miniature tem¬ 
ples. These are of such different design that, if they had been found 
separately, I might have been inclined to refer them to different archi¬ 
tectural epochs. But the excessively archaic type of one must be attri¬ 
buted to the influence of religious conservatism ; similar forms may be 
seen in conjunction on the front of the temples of Khajuraho, which are 
known to be of the tenth century A. D. A circular pillar, with a coil 
of human-headed snakes at the base, is, as already xuentioned, from Ahar, 
as also a mediaeval door-jamb and a block carved with rows of temple 
fafades in the style of the Nasik caves. This last is probably the oldest 
of the group. Another door-jamb, found in the court-yard of the mosque 
at Bulandshahr, is comparatively modern. 
The Sarovar, or Tank, field, of which I have spoken above, is bounded 
on the north by an extensive mound, on which now stands the stable for 
