Yasaskara becomes king

From an official’s family to the throne

Yasaskara ruled Kashmir from 939 to 948 in the chronology followed here. His accession followed the removal of the child Suravarman II and a dispute over who should occupy the vacant throne. Kalhana presents his rise as a remarkable reversal: a learned man returning from poverty abroad became king through the choice of a Brahman assembly.

The Rajatarangini traces his family through Viradeva of Pancakapura, Viradeva’s son Kanadeva and Kanadeva’s son Prabhakaradeva. Kanadeva is described as a teacher in Meruvardhana’s household who later became a treasurer. Prabhakaradeva, Yasaskara’s father, also rose to a treasury office. This was a family connected with education and government service, even though Yasaskara was not heir to the reigning royal line.

Kalhana also alleges a secret relationship between Prabhakaradeva and Sugandha. That claim belongs to the chronicle’s court narrative and is not independently established here. It should not be used to invent a different parentage for Yasaskara.

According to the same account, Yasaskara had left Kashmir in poverty with a companion named Thalgunaka. He returned with renewed hopes, described through auspicious dreams and the blessings of a goddess. Those religious elements explain his fortune within the narrative; they do not supply independently verifiable causes of his accession.

Selection in 939 and distance from the kingmakers

Kamalavardhana had displaced Suravarman II but failed to secure the crown for himself. During the resulting deliberations, the child’s mother sent envoys to plead for her son. They enlisted Yasaskara for his eloquence. When he appeared before the assembled Brahmans, they instead chose him and performed the water ceremony of inauguration.

This was not a vote by the entire population. The source describes a particular assembly acting amid military intervention, pressure from priests associated with sacred places and competing claims to rule. The exact accession day and Gregorian month are not established.

At the beginning of the next book, Kalhana describes Yasaskara restricting access to his presence. He acknowledged his debt to the Brahmans who had selected him but warned that their role might make them overbearing. They were to approach him on business rather than assume unrestricted personal access. The episode presents a new ruler trying to distinguish the authority of the crown from dependence on those who had conferred it.

Order, agriculture and the chronicler’s ideal society

Kalhana credits Yasaskara with reviving earlier royal ordinances and supervising officials who had previously enriched themselves through plunder. He describes safe roads, open shops at night and villagers absorbed in cultivation. These are strong claims of restored order, not measured crime statistics or evidence that every village enjoyed the same conditions.

The account also praises learned judges, physicians, councillors, teachers and other officeholders. Its vision of good government combines administrative competence with strict expectations about social and religious roles. Brahmans are praised for study rather than carrying weapons, while ascetics and ritual specialists are judged by the author’s standards of proper conduct.

Some of this praise is inseparable from Kalhana’s social prejudices. His criticism of women acting as religious teachers, for example, tells us about his preferred hierarchy. It should not be reproduced as evidence that women’s religious authority was inherently improper. The passage offers a view of contested practices as well as an idealized portrait of the reign.

The house sale and the altered deed

The first extended story of Yasaskara’s justice concerns a man who had sold his house before travelling abroad. He said he had reserved a stepped well so that his wife could live from payments made by people storing flowers and betel leaves in its cool interior. After twenty years away, he returned to find her working in other households. She said the buyer had beaten her and driven her from the well.

The man’s earlier appeals had failed. He then resorted to a fast that threatened his life, demanding the king’s intervention. Yasaskara assembled the judges and examined the deed, which appeared to include the well in the sale. Rather than accept that wording as decisive, he investigated the transaction.

In Kalhana’s account, the king borrowed the merchant’s ring while entertaining those present, then sent an attendant with it to obtain the merchant’s account book. An unusually large payment to the official recorder suggested corruption. The recorder was summoned under a promise of immunity, and the alteration was exposed.

The legal trick depends on a small change in the Sanskrit wording. Stein explains that sahita, meaning included or together with, had replaced rahita, meaning excluded or without. The king awarded the claimant the merchant’s house and property and expelled the merchant.

This is a literary account of adjudication, not a surviving case file or original deed. Its details nevertheless make property, women’s maintenance, documentary fraud and official fees part of the history of the reign. The wife’s loss of income is central to the dispute, even though the narrative gives the appeal to her husband.

The coins in the well and the meaning of an agreement

A second story concerns a returning traveller who lost a hundred gold coins in a well at Lavanotsa. A man offered to retrieve them. The distressed owner agreed that the rescuer should give him whatever seemed right. After recovering the money, the rescuer handed back two coins and kept ninety-eight.

The traveller appealed to Yasaskara, saying a courteous expression had been exploited to take his earnings. The king heard the account, arranged for the other man to be identified and ruled that ninety-eight coins should go to the owner and two to the rescuer.

The reasoning turns on the ambiguity of the agreement: the amount the rescuer had treated as desirable for himself was the amount he ought to give the owner under the king’s interpretation. Kalhana uses the story to praise discernment beyond a self-serving appeal to contractual language.

Both well stories depict people appealing beyond an unsatisfactory local response to the ruler himself. They should not be treated as proof of a modern court system, a general statutory rule or the actual frequency of successful appeals. They reveal the kinds of justice Kalhana wanted a good king to exercise.

Revenue, violence and allegations within the court

The chronicle interrupts its praise with criticism. Yasaskara is said to have accumulated wealth through four city prefects. Stein interprets their overlapping appointments as a way to extract competing payments from officials, who in turn recovered money from inhabitants. This complicates the earlier portrait of protection from predatory administration.

Another verse says that foot soldiers met their end through him despite his symbolic deposition of a sword at a shrine of Shiva. Stein tentatively reads this as an allusion to violent action against the troublesome Tantrins. The passage does not provide a detailed campaign, a securely identified group of victims or a casualty count.

Kalhana also reports that Yasaskara’s conspicuous joy at an elder brother’s death led people to suspect poisoning. The suspicion is not equivalent to a demonstrated murder. Other allegations concern a favoured official’s relations with royal women and the influence of Lalla, a courtesan whom the king elevated within his household.

The story of Lalla’s relationship with a watchman is framed through hostile caste labels and sweeping attacks on women. Kalhana describes spies, the king’s distress and acts of ritual expiation. Those claims may be recorded without adopting the author’s contempt or treating a relationship across caste boundaries as inherently degrading. This Lalla belongs to the tenth-century court narrative and should not be confused with the later poet Lal Ded.

The students’ matha and riverside endowments

Yasaskara founded a matha on land that had belonged to his father, intended for students from Aryadesa pursuing learning. The notice connects Kashmir with a wider movement of students, although it does not give an enrolment list, curriculum or surviving institutional charter.

Kalhana says the king bestowed royal insignia, including umbrellas and fly-whisks, on the establishment’s superintendent, while retaining the mint-dies and the royal household. The gesture is explained through religious merit and hopes for future births. It should not be mistaken for an actual transfer of the kingdom to the superintendent.

The king is also credited with fifty-five agraharas for Brahmans on the bank of the Vitasta. Stein records a manuscript gloss locating them at Kathela, identified with Kathul in Srinagar. That is a transmitted location tradition, not a surveyed map proving the boundaries or survival of all fifty-five grants.

The matha later became the place to which the dying king withdrew. Its role in both educational patronage and the final crisis links an institutional foundation with the personal history of its donor.

A separate notice, placed under Parvagupta’s reign, records a temple of Vishnu named Yasaskarasvamin that Yasaskara had left unfinished. Kalhana says an unnamed surviving queen obtained its completion from Parvagupta after he sought her sexually, then died by self-immolation rather than fulfil the promise she had made. The account is shaped by religious praise and expectations of widowhood; its glorification of her death should not be adopted as an endorsement.

This unnamed woman should not be equated with Trailokyadevi, whose death has already been reported. The Vishnu temple is also distinct from the students’ matha and the later Shiva shrine founded by Parvagupta. The notice extends the history of Yasaskara’s patronage beyond his death without establishing a surviving building or an exact completion date.

Illness and a succession reversed

An abdominal illness led Yasaskara to arrange a successor. He first had his relative Varnata consecrated with the support of ministers, Ekangas and chiefs. Kalhana says he passed over Samgramadeva, regarded as his son, because he believed the child was not biologically his. This is another disputed-parentage claim within the chronicle, not independently established genealogy.

Varnata’s failure to visit the dying king then became the reason for reversal in the narrative. Ministers encouraged Yasaskara to install Samgramadeva instead. Varnata was confined overnight in the hall of eight columns and removed the following morning. The account calls him a one-day king.

After Samgramadeva’s inauguration, Yasaskara left the palace for his matha. Kalhana accuses Parvagupta and four other ministers of taking the money he carried while he was still alive. He further alleges that attendants and relatives impatient for his death poisoned him after several days of suffering.

These are serious allegations in a later historical narrative. The illness cannot be assigned a modern diagnosis from the description, and the poisoning account is not supported here by an independent contemporary medical or judicial record. Kalhana separately reports and rejects a supernatural explanation involving a magician’s revenge.

Death, coins and later memory

Kalhana dates Yasaskara’s death to the third day of the dark half of Bhadrapada, Laukika year 4024, conventionally 948, after nine years of rule. The traditional date is retained without an unverified Gregorian conversion. He says Trailokyadevi died as a sati after the king’s death. The passage praises her action but does not provide enough evidence to determine her wishes or the pressures surrounding it.

A separate material record survives in a coin attributed to Yasaskara by the British Museum, registration OR.8199. The catalogue describes an alloy specimen weighing 6.29 grams and dates it to 939–949. That range differs from the 939–948 reign chronology followed here. The object entry does not resolve the discrepancy or independently establish the exact year of his death.

Yasaskara’s accession also appears in the later illustrated Jami al-Tawarikh of Rashid al-Din. The Khalili Collections identify a scene on manuscript MSS 727, folio 28b, as his enthronement by Kashmir’s nobles. The manuscript is associated with Tabriz and dated 1314–1315. It is evidence of his story’s later circulation, not a contemporary portrait or eyewitness depiction of the assembly in 939.

The reign left a complex historical memory: an unexpected accession, celebrated judgments, educational patronage, criticism of revenue practices and allegations of betrayal at the end. Its detail comes mainly from a chronicler who admired Yasaskara’s intelligence while judging society through his own religious, caste and gender assumptions. Reading those judgments critically preserves both the events he reports and the limits of his account.