Narendraditya and the late pre-Karkota sequence

The ruler named Lahkhana

Narendraditya, also called Lahkhana, appears near the end of Kalhana’s account of the rulers preceding the Karkota dynasty. The surviving passage is short, but it records a royal family, a temple foundation, ministers and an office for preserving records. Attempts to identify this king through coins have made his name part of a much larger debate about Kashmir’s early chronology.

This entry concerns the Narendraditya of Book III, verses 383–385. Kalhana also describes an earlier Narendraditya, called Khinkhila, in Book I. Their similar names have to be kept separate before asking whether either can be connected with a historically attested coin issuer. The chronicle does not provide enough secure evidence to assign Lahkhana-Narendraditya an exact Common Era reign.

Family and succession in Kalhana’s account

Kalhana identifies Lahkhana-Narendraditya as a son of Yudhishthira by Queen Padmavati. In the preceding narrative, this Yudhishthira succeeds Pravarasena II. Narendraditya is therefore placed as Pravarasena’s grandson within the chronicle’s genealogy.

His queen is named Vimalaprabha. His ministers include Vajra and Kanaka, sons of Vajrendra, who had served the previous ruler. These names suggest continuity between the two courts as Kalhana presents them. The passage does not describe the ministers’ responsibilities or independently document how their positions were inherited.

Kalhana assigns the king a reign of thirteen years. He then introduces Narendraditya’s younger brother Ranaditya, also called Tunjina, as successor. The family relationships and reign length belong to the chronicle’s account; they are not a separately confirmed sequence of dated accessions.

A temple and an office for records

The king is credited with building the temple of Narendrasvamin. Kalhana names the foundation without supplying a building description, measurements or a construction date in this passage. A modern site identification requires evidence beyond a resemblance between names.

The other act singled out is the establishment of the king’s own special office for keeping records, as Stein translates the passage. This is a valuable reference to the place of record keeping in Kalhana’s understanding of royal government. It does not preserve the contents of the records themselves.

Nothing in these verses establishes a surviving archive, identifies its staff or tells us whether its work concerned revenue, land grants, court proceedings or another administrative task. Nor does the passage prove that written administration began under this king. Its specific claim is that he established an office of his own.

Why the earlier Narendraditya must remain distinct

In Book I, verses 347–349, Kalhana describes Narendraditya-Khinkhila as the son of Gokarna. That ruler is associated with shrines of Bhuteshvara and a permanent endowment for feeding Brahmans. His teacher Ugra is credited with another shrine and a circle of the Mothers. Kalhana assigns him thirty-six years and a hundred days of rule.

Those details do not occur in the short account of Lahkhana-Narendraditya. Combining them would create a longer biography, but one that the text does not supply. The two entries have different parents, associated people, foundations and reign lengths.

The difficulty is greater than distinguishing two identical personal names. Stein considered the relationship between names in the chronicle and names on Hun coins, while also recognizing that Kalhana’s early chronology separates potentially related figures by implausibly long intervals. A proposed identification must therefore explain the differences as well as the resemblance.

Stein’s proposed connection with a silver coin

Stein discussed a silver coin published by Alexander Cunningham whose legend he read as Raja Lahkhana Udayaditya. He considered its resemblance to a coin of Khingila significant and proposed that its issuer might be the Lahkhana-Narendraditya of Kalhana’s account.

The proposal contains an unresolved mismatch: the coin’s second name is Udayaditya, while the chronicle gives Narendraditya. Stein acknowledged that the material available to him did not explain that difference. In his chronological discussion, he expressly stopped short of treating the identification as certain.

This is a historical scholarly hypothesis about a particular silver issue. It should not be simplified into a statement that every coin labelled Narendra or Narendraditya belongs to this king. Different metals, legends, designs and reported find histories can point to different issues and rulers.

Gold coins and changing attributions

A record in the Indian Numismatic, Historical and Cultural Research Foundation database illustrates the problem. It describes a base-gold dinara as a coin of Narendraditya of Kashmir, assigns it broadly to the sixth–seventh centuries, and gives a weight of 7.56 grams. Its provenance field is empty and the description places it in a private collection. The record preserves an attribution, not a documented Kashmir excavation context.

Joe Cribb’s reassessment separates a series of debased gold coins formerly attributed to Kashmir from the Kashmir sequence represented by another group. The older attributions included issues labelled Narendraditya. He argues for locating the detached series in the Punjab and/or Kanauj, while acknowledging that exact dates and individual royal identifications remain problematic.

That argument challenges the automatic use of such gold coins to confirm a Kashmir king list. It does not by itself settle Stein’s separate proposal concerning a silver coin named Lahkhana-Udayaditya. The two questions need their own evidence.

An unresolved place in the chronology

The catalogue’s original c. 600 entry was a provisional research marker. The sources examined here do not establish that as Lahkhana-Narendraditya’s date. This article therefore appears among topics whose year is not established, with its relative place in Kalhana’s sequence explained in the text. No month is assigned.

The next steps are comparison of the original silver specimen and its published readings, the history of the gold-coin attributions, and independent evidence for Narendrasvamin and the recorded royal family. Until that work yields firmer links, the short chronicle account and the competing identifications should remain visible as distinct parts of the record.