Place · Gupta-era inscription town · India
Mandasor (Daśapura)
Also known as Battle of Sondani, Dasapura, Eran, Sondani
The town of Dasapura (modern Mandasor in western Madhya Pradesh) is named in a famous 5th-century Sanskrit inscription of 473 CE recording a silk-weavers' guild from Lata (Gujarat) migrating to Dasapura under the Gupta king Kumaragupta I, and building a sun temple with their collective funds — the earliest explicit record of guild-funded temple building in India. The adjacent Eran column of around 510 CE records the earliest dated sati in India — the self-immolation of Bhanugupta's queen Goparaja after his death. Mandasor and Eran together document the social history of late-Gupta northern India through inscriptions, as a different documentary genre from the dynastic prashastis.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Gupta
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 24.070, 75.070
Worth knowing
Yashodharman's victory pillars at nearby Sondani mark his defeat of the Hūṇa Mihirakula; the Mandasor silk-weavers' inscription of 473–74 is a famous Gupta-age record.
Connections (5)
- Imperial inscription atDeogarh Dashavatara temple
The Mandasor inscriptions record a temple built by a guild of silk weavers who had migrated from Gujarat, repaired by them decades later out of their own funds — a social document rather than a dynastic one — and the Eran record of 510 is the earliest dated notice of sati in India. Deogarh's temple is the architecture of the same order. Gupta inscriptions are unusual in India for telling you about people who were not kings.
- Succession in timeEran
Eran and Mandasor are both Gupta-period sites in Malwa about two hundred kilometres apart, and their inscriptions cover the Hunnic wars from both sides of the collapse: Mandasor records a victory over the Hunas under Yashodharman in the 530s, and Eran records Bhanugupta's engagement around 510 and Toramana's own rule over the district. The Gupta order does not survive intact, and the inscriptions are how we know.
- Imperial inscription atEran
Eran carries a pillar of Budhagupta, a boar colossus inscribed in the reign of the Huna king Toramana, and the record of Bhanugupta's engagement with the notice of his officer's wife burning herself — the earliest dated sati. Mandasor carries Yashodharman's claim to have defeated Mihirakula. Between two sites in Malwa the whole Hunnic episode is documented, by the campaign's participants rather than by later chroniclers.
- Craft tradition ofBanaras brocade
The Mandasor inscription of 473 records that a guild of silk weavers migrated from Lāta in Gujarat to Daśapura, built a sun temple with their own money, and that when it decayed the guild repaired it — noting that some members had by then become archers, astrologers and ascetics. It is the fullest account anywhere of how an early Indian craft guild actually worked, and it says weaving communities moved as bodies rather than as individuals, which is how Banaras and Kanchipuram got their weavers too.
- Imperial inscription atYaśodharman
Yashodharman raised two pillars at Sondani outside Dasapura, and a third inscription at Mandsaur fort claims territory from the Himalaya to the western ocean. The Aulikaras had been Gupta feudatories; within two generations they were claiming an empire. The Gupta collapse is visible in this town as a change in whose name the local prashastis are composed.
On these journeys
Sources
Mandasor and Eran inscriptions, CII
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