Kharavela

The inscription is badly damaged; of its 17 lines, only four are completely legible, the rest partly lost and eroded by natural processes.

[4][5][6] Composed as it is in a very obscure Prakrit, and its characters badly weathered by centuries of exposure to the elements and in places quite illegible, the Hathigumpha inscription has long been the subject of a great controversy among historians and paleographers.

[10] Many other scholars, such as D.C. Sircar and Walter Spink, date Kharavela and the Hathigumpha inscription in the 1st-century BCE to early 1st-century CE.

[14][15] The first line of the Hathigumpha inscription calls Kharavela "Chetaraja-vasa-vadhanena" (चेतराज वस वधनेन, "the one who extended the family of the Cheta King").

[16] R. D. Banerji and D. C. Sircar interpreted "Cheti" (चेति) to be referring to a dynasty from which Kharavela descended, namely Chedi mahajanapada.

According to a small inscription found in the Mancapuri Cave, Kharavela's successor Kudepasiri also styled himself as Aira Maharaja Kalingadhipati Mahameghavahana (Devanagari: ऐर महाराजा कलिंगाधिपतिना महामेघवाहन).

Indraji's work corrected this error, and established that the king mentioned in the Hathugumpha inscription was Kharavela and that he was a descendant of Mahameghavahana.

[20] Scholars such as Sircar and Sharma, based on later discovered Guntupalli inscriptions, state that Kharavela was one of the ancient Mahameghavahana dynasty king from Kalinga.

[21] Suniti Kumar Chatterji interpreted "Kharavela" as a name of Dravidian origin, possibly derived from the words kar ("black and terrible") and vel ("lance").

[23] According to Braj Nath Puri, it is difficult to suggest a Dravidian cultural origin for Kharavela's dynasty or connect it to South India with certainty.

[24] N. K. Sahu also doubts this theory, where he interprets "Aira" or "Aila" word in the Hathigumpha inscription as Kharavela must be self identifying himself as an Aryan.

One reason for doubts is that Hathigumpha inscription explicitly states he was a devotee of all religious sects (sava-pāsanḍa pūjako) and repaired temples dedicated to a variety of gods (sava-de[vāya]tana-sakāra-kārako).

[32] According to the Hathigumpha inscription, Kharavela spent his first 24 years on education and sports, a period when he mastered the fields of writing, coinage, accounting, administration and procedures of law.