The Śilāhāra Story

<p>Today we seek to unravel the yet to be deciphered ethnic story in the <i>Śilāhāra</i> inscriptions. All the three <i>Śilāhāra </i>families - North Konkan (800 CE), South Konkan(765 CE) and Kolhapur (940 CE) - claimed descent from the <i>vidyādhara </i>prince <i>Jīmūtavāhana</i>. For instance, the <i>Khārēpāṭaṇa</i> plates of <i>Raṭṭarāja</i> dated 1008 CE proclaim : “<i>There was the lord of the vidyādhara, Jīmūtavāhana by name, a good son of Jīmūtakētu, who sacrificed his life to Garuda. From him was descended the </i><i>Śilāhāra</i><i> family, the best among the royal families of </i><i>Siṁhala</i>.”. [Mirashi, 1977 :<i>Corpus Inscriptionum Indicarum</i>, Vol 6, 191] Reading this in the context ofthe references to <i>vidyādhara</i> in <i>Jaina Rāmāyaṇa</i>, Guṇāḍhya’s <i>Bṛhatkathā</i> and Saṃghadāsagaṇin’s <i>Vasudevahiṃḍi</i>, we have already concluded that the <i>vidyādhara</i> could be a community that arose out of the ‘cultural and racial’ miscegenation of the <i>kshatriya </i>(of pure Indo-Gangetic stock) and the <i>kirāta</i>. [<i>Vidyādhara And Kirāt</i>, 01 Apr 18] The <i>Śilāhāra </i>history carries two clear markers that point to their origin – the Jaina religion and the <i>Śiva</i> worship; the former is the evidence of their <i>jaina</i> (<i>kshatriya</i> from the eastern Indo-Gangetic plain) ancestry, and the latter of their <i>kirāta</i> heritage.