Which Kalinga king is praised in the Hathigumpha inscription?

The Kalinga king praised in the Hathigumpha inscription is Kharavela.

The inscription is a seventeen-line Prakrit record carved in Brahmi script at Hathigumpha, or “Elephant Cave,” in the Udayagiri Hills near Bhubaneswar, Odisha. It is a Jain inscription and provides the principal surviving account of Kharavela’s reign.

Its damaged text describes royal projects, festivals, donations, military campaigns and religious patronage, often in a year-by-year format. Scholars generally date it somewhere between the second century BCE and the early first century CE, though both its reading and chronology remain debated.

A common mix-up is to associate the inscription with a Nanda ruler or the Satavahana king Satakarni, both of whom are mentioned in disputed passages. They are figures in the inscription’s narrative, not the Kalinga ruler being celebrated. Kharavela’s identification itself began with nineteenth-century epigraphic scholarship, despite continuing disagreements over individual lines.