In which inscription is the mention of Bharatvarsha found?

Question

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Correct — D, the Hathigumpha inscription of Kharavela. Carved in the Hathigumpha ('elephant cave') in the Udayagiri hills near Bhubaneswar in Odisha, this seventeen-line Prakrit record in Brahmi script gives a year-by-year account of the reign of Kharavela, the Chedi (Mahameghavahana) king of Kalinga in about the 1st century BCE. Among his campaigns the record speaks of an army despatched to Bharadhavasa — Bharatavarsha — which is why this inscription is regularly cited as one of the earliest epigraphic occurrences of the name Bharatvarsha.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The Ayodhya inscription of Dhanadeva, a king of Kosala, is famous for something else — it records that he was descended from Pushyamitra Sunga, who performed two ashvamedha sacrifices. It carries no mention of Bharatvarsha.  (b) The Sanskrit verse on the iron pillar now at the Qutb complex, Mehrauli, praises a king named Chandra (usually identified with Chandragupta II) for his conquests and his devotion to Vishnu; it does not use the term Bharatvarsha.  (c) The Garuda pillar at Besnagar (Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh) records that Heliodorus, the Greek envoy of Antialkidas sent to king Kasiputra Bhagabhadra, set it up as a Bhagavata devotee of Vasudeva — a landmark for early Vaishnavism, not for the name Bharatvarsha.

Concept: Inscriptions are the hardest evidence early Indian history has: they are dated, they are contemporary, and they cannot be re-edited by later copyists. Because of this, prelims papers tend to test one thing per inscription — the single fact for which each record is famous. The Hathigumpha inscription is a prashasti, a eulogy of Kharavela of Kalinga, and it is quoted for three things: his patronage of Jainism (he brought back a Jina image that a Nanda king had carried off), his repair of an old Nanda-era canal, and his use of the term Bharadhavasa (Bharatavarsha).

State PCS 2026 Q58 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q58 — History PYQ with Answer