The Śilāhāra Story

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