The Bhāgīrathī Story
In that sense, it may not be totally absurd to surmise that the Rāṣṭrakūṭa were indeed memorialising their place of origin by taking the titles ‘lattalūrapuravarēśvara’ or ‘lattalūrapuraparmēśvara’ – not the place from which they emerged in the 8th century CE, or in the 2nd century CE as some historians believe (Reu, 1933 : History of the Rashtrakutas, 5), but the place from which they originally hailed.
That takes us to an even more interesting hypothesis : Could the Lattalūrapura or Lattalūra they were memorialising be the place from where the kshatriya of Loṭli had come ? Just as we surmised that the kshatriya of Kuṭṭhāḷæ (Cortalim) and Sāṁkhavāḷæ (Sancoale) could have come from Kuśasthaḷī in Kāṭhīyāvāḍa. Possibly Lattalūra was a larger territory of which Lattalūrapura was the capital (pura = town or capital). Incidentally, a branch of the Rāṣṭrakūṭa ruled from Lāṭa between 757 and 888. [Reu, 1933 : 93] Lāṭa or Lāṭadeśa lay around the cleft formed by the Kāṭhīyāvāḍa peninsula and mainland Gujarat and included modern Surat, Bharuch, Kheda and Vadodara. Though it is generally held that the Rāṣṭrakūṭa originated in Deccan and extended their empire northwards, their origin would definitely be beyond Narmada – for they were kshatriya (inhabitants of the Indo-Gangetic plain); Lāṭa might not have been an alien land to them. Kuśasthaḷī in the north-west of the peninsula to Sōraṭh in the south to Lāṭa in the south-east, forms a coastal strip girdling Kāṭhīyāvāḍa. Therefore, what we have said about Kuśasthaḷī and Sōraṭh may be applicable to Lāṭa as well – the rising sea levels could have driven its inhabitants into Deccan in search of fresh pastures. Could then we allow the possibility that the kshatriya of Loṭli named it after Lāṭa, the homeland that they had left ?
