Vṛṣṇi corporation

The corporate seal

A well-known copper coin, of about the first century BCE, carries the legend of the Vṛṣṇi corporation with the title of the chief and the leader, on the pattern of the Yaudheya and Mālava issues. It is a small body of evidence, but it establishes that the Vṛṣṇis were an actual political corporation and not only a lineage of story.

The Mora well inscription, from near Mathurā and dated to the reign of the satrap Śoḍāsa, records the installation of stone images of the five Vṛṣṇi heroes in a shrine. Fragments of such images have been recovered in the area.

The five heroes

The five Vṛṣṇi vīras — usually given as Saṃkarṣaṇa, Vāsudeva, Pradyumna, Sāmba and Aniruddha — are the deified members of the clan whose worship stands at the beginning of the Bhāgavata and later Vaiṣṇava traditions. The Mathurā evidence, together with the Heliodorus pillar at Besnagar, shows this cult established and receiving public endowment by the second and first centuries BCE.

The corporation and the cult are thus attested together, in the same country and the same period, which is a rare conjunction: a clan body that issues its own coinage while its ancestors are being installed as gods in a shrine a few miles away.