The varddhana house of aulikaras

Scholars were not aware of the Varddhana ruling house of Aulikaras¹ till the discovery of Risthal stone inscription. Even after the discovery of three inscriptions of Yaśodharman in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and in spite of a specific use of the phrase Aulikara-lāñchhanah for Yaśodharman in one of the inscriptions, scholars could not link him with another ruling house popularly known as the Varman branch² of the ruling Aulikaras as the names of all the kings of this family end in ‘varman’. Nilakantha Sastri remarks, “Yaśodharman of Malwa stands alone without predecessors or successors.”³ R.C. Majumdar also states, “he rose and fell like a meteor between AD 530 and 540 and his empire perished with him.”⁴ But with the discovery of Risthal stone slab inscription dated Mālava Samvat 572 in 1983, came to light an entire new line of six Aulikara rulers, and the last of them, namely Prakāśadharman, was apparently the predecessor of YaśodharmanVishnuvarddhana. It has set to rest all the speculation about the ancestry of Yaśodharman. Now scholars generally accept that he belonged to the line of Aulikara rulers mentioned in the Risthal stone inscription, which is different from that of the Varman branch of the Aulikaras. The relationship between these two ruling families has become a hotly debated topic among scholars. None of the two houses has any name which is common in their respective genealogies and there is no specific evidence to establish a direct link between the two, except that these two houses belonged to the same Mālava stock and both houses had the same family appellation, ‘Aulikara’, which both of them have used at least once in their inscriptions. It thus appears, at least in the present state of our knowledge that the two Aulikara houses were not related to each other in any way except that they belonged to the same clan.