Rudradāman I#Rudradaman
A figure from the books
#Rudradaman
Rudradāman I · r. c. 130–150 CE
In the books · 1 chapter
Who this is
Kingship and patronage — Western Kṣatrapa dynasty; commissioner of the Junagadh rock inscription, the first long public text in classical Sanskrit.
“On one granite boulder in Gujarat sit Aśoka's Prakrit edicts, Rudradāman's Sanskrit self-praise, and a Gupta emperor's sequel three centuries later — six hundred years of Indian statecraft on a single rock, and the man in the middle, the immigrant's grandson, is the one who changed the language.”
The big idea, in the book's words:
“A foreign-descended king rebuilt a four-hundred-year-old Mauryan dam — and announced the repair in polished literary Sanskrit, the moment the language of the priests became the language of the state.”
From the book
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