Yashodharman defeats the Huna king Mihirakula

The victory is known almost only from Yashodharman’s own inscriptions. The two identical sandstone columns at Sondani (Sondhni), some 3 km south-east of the fort of Mandsaur, each about 13.5 m high, bear a eulogy composed by Vasula, son of Kakka, and engraved by Govinda. It claims that feudatories bowed to Yashodharman from the Lauhitya (Brahmaputra) to Mount Mahendra and from the Himalaya to the Western Ocean, and that the strength of his arm bent the head of ‘that famous king Mihirakula’ in homage. J. F. Fleet discovered the inscriptions in 1884 and published them in 1886. A stone inscription from Mandsaur dated to year 589 of the Malava era (532), which also calls the king Vishnuvardhana, records a well dug by Daksha in memory of his uncle Abhayadatta, the king’s viceroy, and says that the king had subdued mighty kings of the east and many of the north.

Neither text says where or when the battle was fought. The date of 528 often given for a ‘battle of Sondani’ is not given in any inscription. Hans Bakker places the victory around 532 and the pillars a year or two later; he suggests that Yashodharman led a coalition of Indian kings against the Huns, winning over the ‘eastern kings’ — probably the Maukharis of Kanauj — by peaceful means, and that the decisive battle was probably fought in the Betwa valley. Xuanzang ascribes a victory over Mihirakula to Baladitya, king of Magadha; how the two accounts relate is unclear. The Huns lost their hold on central India and withdrew to the Punjab and Kashmir, but Yashodharman’s empire was short-lived, and the Aulikaras soon vanish from the record.