Bappa, when he succeeded to the Mori prince, is said to have been fifteen years old; and his birth being one year anterior to the Mori inscription of 770 + 14 = S.V. 784 (A.D. 728),[[32]] is the period for the foundation of the Guhilot dynasty in Mewar: since which, during a space of eleven hundred years, fifty-nine princes lineally descended from Bappa have sat on the throne of Chitor.
Though the bards and chroniclers will never forgive the temerity which thus curtails the antiquity of their founder, he is yet placed in the dawn of chivalry, when the Carlovingian dynasty was established in the west, and when Walid, whose bands planted ‘the green standard’ on the Ebro, was ‘commander of the faithful.’
From the deserted and now forgotten ‘city of the sun,’ Aitpur, the abode of wild beasts and savage Bhils, another memorial[[33]] of the princes of Mewar was obtained. It relates to the prince Sakti Kumar. Its date is S. 1024 (A.D. 968), and it contains the names of fourteen of his ancestors in regular succession. Amongst these is Bappa, or Saila. When compared with the chronicles and [231] family archives, it was highly gratifying to find that, with the exception of one superfluous name and the transposition of others, they were in perfect accordance.
Hume says, “Poets, though they disfigure the most certain history by their fictions, and use strange liberties with truth, when they are the sole historians, as among the Britons, have commonly some foundation for their wildest exaggerations.” The remark is applicable here; for the names which had been mouldering for nine centuries, far from the abode of man, are the same they had worked into their poetical legends. It was at this exact epoch that the arms of Islam, for the first time, crossed the Indus. In the ninety-fifth year of the Hegira,[[34]] Muhammad bin Kasim, the general of the Caliph Walid, conquered Sind, and penetrated (according to early Arabian authors) to the Ganges; and although Elmacin mentions only Sind, yet other Hindu States were at this period convulsed from the same cause: witness the overthrow of Manikrae of Ajmer, in the middle of the eighth century, by a foe ‘coming in ships,’ Anjar specified as the point where they landed. If any doubt existed that it was Kasim who advanced to Chitor[[35]] and was defeated by Bappa, it was set at rest by finding at this time in Chitor ‘Dahir,[[36]] the prince of Debil.’ Abu-l Fazl[[37]] records, from Arabian authorities, that Dahir was lord of Sind, and resided at his capital, Debal, the first place captured by Kasim in 95. His miserable end, and the destruction of his house, are mentioned by the historian, and account for the son being found with the Mori prince of Chitor.
Nine princes intervened between Bappa and Sakti Kumar, in two centuries (twenty-two years to each reign): just the time which should elapse from the founder, who ‘abandoned his country for Iran,’ in S. 820, or A.D. 764. Having thus established four epochs in the earlier history of the family, viz.—Kanaksen’[Kanaksen’], A.D. 144; 2, Siladitya, and sack of Valabhi, A.D. 524; 3, Establishment in Chitor and Mewar, A.D. 720; 4, Sakti Kumar, A.D. 1068;[[38]] we may endeavour to relieve this narrative by the notices which regard their Persian descent [232].
[1]. [This corroborates Bhandarkar’s theory that the Guhilots sprang from Nāgar Brāhmans.]
[2]. [This is a folk-etymology to explain the name Guhilot, probably derived from Guha or Guhasena (A.D. 559-67), the fourth and apparently the first great Valabhi monarch (BG, i. Part i. 85).]
[3]. [Mandalīka seems to mean ‘ruler of a district’ (mandal), (Bayley, Dynasties of Gujarāt, 183).]
[4]. [Āīn, ii. 268.]