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It was in the time of the immediate succes- sors of this king, and in the eleventh century, that the Sena Rajas of Eastern Bengal rose in power, and wrested from them the eastern provinces, leaving them Magadha, where the Pdla kings continued to reign till the dynasty came to a sudden end shortly after 1 178, the date of the last inscription of this line of kings, f Of the Sena Rajas, Dr. Rajendra Lala believes the first, Vira Sena, to be the same as the renowned Adi Sura, who is supposed to have brought five Brahmans and five Kayasthas from Kanouj because Bengal was poor in learned men. General Cunningham, however, consi- • Archaeological Survey of India, Vol. XV, p. 156. Digitized by Google 2 46 PAURANIK PERIOD. [BOOK V. ders that Vira Sena was a remote ancestor of the later Sena kings and reigned in the seventh century A. D. This is not unlikely if we consider that the descendants of the ten Brahmans and Kayasthas said to have been brought by Adi Sura had so multiplied by the eleventh century as to require a classification by Ballala. To the reigns of kings Samanta Sena to Lakshaneya, General Cunningham assigns dates from 975 to 11 98 A. D. Of Samanta and his son Hemanta little is known. The next king was Vijaya, and his son was the cele- brated Ballala Sena. It is said that the Brahmanas and Kayasthas im- ported from Kanouj had multiplied by this time, and Ballala forbade all intermarriage between the original Brahmanas and Kayasthas of the country with the descendants of the new comers from Kanouj ; and com- plicated rules were framed by him and by his succes- sors to elevate the status of those who succeeded in securing the alliances of Kulins. It is probable, how- ever, that Ballala only gave his sanction to distinctions and rules which had already grown up among the different classes of Brahmans and Kayasthas. Ballala was succeeded by Lakshmana Sena. His prime minister was Halayudha, the author of Brdhmatia Sarvasva, and his brothers wrote Pasupati Paddhati and Ahnika Paddhati. Mahommedan historians state that this king greatly embellished the city of Gour. Digitized by Google CHAP. III.] BENGAL AND ORISSA. 247 He was followed successively by his two sons Madhava Sena and Kesava Sena. Then came Laksh- maneya, in whose reign Bengal was conquered by Bakhtiyar Khilji about 1204 A. D., or 1198 A. D. by other accounts. The chief seat of the Sena family seems to have been Vikramapura near Dacca, where the supposed ruins of Ballala's palace are still shewn to travellers- The Senas were Hindus as the Palas were Buddhists and the gradual substitution of the one dynasty by another really marks the decay and death of the Buddhist religion and the universal acceptance of modern Hinduism in Bengal. The cause of the rise and fall of dynasties often lies deeper than appears on the surface, and in India the rise of new dynasties during the 8th and 9th centuries is intimately connected with the rise of Pauranik Hinduism over the ashes of Buddhism. The race or caste to which the Pala and the Sena kings of Bengal belonged has formed the subject of much animated controversy in recent years in which doughty scholars like Dr. Rajendra Lala and General Cunningham have taken part ! It is not neces- sary that we should enter into the discussion ; we will only state the conclusions which appear to us to be the most plausible. The Palas ruled in Bengal when Jaipala and Ananga Pala were ruling in Western India, and trying to op- Digitized by 248 PAURANIK PERIOD. [BOOK V. pose the march of Sabaktagin and Sultan Mahmud. There is nothing very improbable in the supposition that the Bengal Pdlas were an offshoot from the same Rajput race which founded new kingdoms all over India in the 9th and 10th centuries A. D. They were Kshatriyas, of course, but only in the sense that they were a race of kings and warriors. So long as the Hindus were a living nation, the proud title of Kshatriya was frequently assumed by bold dynasties rising from the ranks, and Rajput kings and even the Mahratta chief Sivaji assumed the title of Ksha- triya. The Senas of Bengal in the present day are Vaidyas, i.e. y they belong to the medical caste ; and they assume therefore that the early Sena kings of Bengal also belonged to the same caste. But before this assump- tion is made, it ought to be shewn that the Vaidyas as a separate caste existed previously in Western or South- ern India from which the Bengal Sena dynasty must have come. We have shewn elsewhere and we will shew again in Chapter VI of this Book, that neither K4yas- thas nor Vaidyas existed as separate castes in the time of Manu and for centuries afterwards. Profes- sional clerks and medical men still belonged to the great body of the Aryan people forming the Vaisya caste ; and they have differentiated into separate castes only in modern times. How can we suppose then that the Sena kings were Vaidyas by caste ? Digitized by Google CHAP. III.] BENGAL AND ORISSA. 249 Vaidyas as a separate caste do not exist to this clay, (so we are informed), in any province outside Bengal ; while in Bengal marriage is still allowed in the eastern districts between respectable Vaidyas and Kayasthas, shewing that they are descended from the common Vaisya stock. What, then, are we to understand by the statement that the Sena kings who came to Bengal from Western or Southern India were Vaidyas by caste ? Gupta Emperors reigned in Northern India in the 4th and 5th centuries A.D., and the Valabhi, or Sena Kings, ruled in Guzrat in the sixth and seventh centuries ; and no scholar has yet told us that they belonged to the medical caste. Many kings of Northern India from the renowned Brahmadatta of Kasi were Dattas ; and we have not been told that these kings were Kayasthas. The fact is that Guptas and Senas and Dattas were merely names in the centuries succeeding the Christian Era, when Vaidyas and Kayasthas as castes were yet un- known. General Cunningham holds that the first Sena or Vira Sena of Bengal was the same king as Sura Sena " who married the princess Bhoga Devi, the sister of Ansu Varma, Raja of Nepal, who was the contemporary of Houen Tsang, and of whom Pandit Bhagwan Lai Indraji has published inscriptions dated in 645 and 651 A. D." The issue of the marriage was Aditya Sena of Magadha, and u hence it seems probable that the latter Sena Rajas of Bengal were the direct descendants of Digitized 250 PAURANIK PERIOD. [BOOK V. Aditya Sena Deva the great king of Magadha."* This is merely a conjecture, and it is an equally plausible con- jecture that the first Sena king of Bengal was a scion of the Valabhi Sena house of Saur&shtra or some Sena house of Southern India. In any case, there can be no doubt that the founder of the Bengal dynasty was a scion of some martial family, Valabhi or Rajput, or Vaisya, who assumed the title of Kshatriya, because he founded a kingdom. The Sena Vaidyas of East Bengal may have good and sufficient reasons for claiming kinship with Ball&la Sena and his successors. But instead of declaring that the ancient kings were Vaidyas, and came to Bengal with pestle and mortar, ointments and drugs, it would be his- torically more intelligible to urge that the descendants of the ancient Vaisya or Kshatriya kings of the Sena dynasty have now become merged in the modern Vaidya or medical caste of Bengal. It is of far greater importance to us to ascertain the race to which the people of Bengal belong. The pro- portion of Aryan population in Bengal has always been and is to this day very small. The Brdhmans are of Aryan blood, except of course the Varna Brihmans who belong to the castes whose religious rites they per- form. The K&yasthas are also of Aryan blood, des- cendants of Aryan Vaisyas, except the menial and cultivating classes of Eastern Bengal and elsewhere, • Archaobgical Survey of India, Vol. XV, p. 163. Digitized by Google CHAP, lit] BENGAL AND ORISSA. 251 (Bhandaris, &c.,) who call themselves Kayasthas, but are generally known as Stidras. The Vaidyas are a small compact body, and are probably of pure Aryan blood, being descendants of the ancient Vai- syas. Of the trading castes the Suvarna Vaniks and some other castes are more or less of Aryan descent Potters, weavers, blacksmiths, goldsmiths, and other artisans are undoubtedly of Aryan blood, descended from the ancient Vaisya stock, and differentiated into different modern castes by following different profes- sions. At the same time there is in these Aryan castes a large admixture of aborigines, those who followed the trades which the conquering Aryans taught them, and thus finally came to belong to the same trade-castes with their conquerors. Beyond this pale, the large agri- cultural, pastoral, hunting, and fishing castes, the Kaivar- tas, the Chandalas, and the millions of agricultural Ma- hommedans arc undoubtedly descended from the non- Aryan aborigines of the soil. Beyond them again, the Bagdis, Bauris, Doms, Hadis, &c, are aborigines who are hardly yet Hinduized. The Aryan population of Bengal Proper, if represented by numbers, would scarcely exceed five millions out of the forty million inhabitants. We now turn to the history of Orissa. Orissa, like Bengal, was probably first colonized by Aryans in the Rationalistic Period, but unlike Bengal, Orissa has me- morials of the early Aryan settlers in its rock-cut caves and palaces, Buddhist missionaries came to this land Digitized by Google 252 PAURANIK PERIOD. [BOOK V. to spread that religion and spend their lives in calm and austere contemplation in caves ; and some of the caves must be referred to a period a century or more before the time of Asoka.