Drachm - Bhagavata Mahadeva

The Audumbaras occupied the Kangra and Hoshiarpur regions of the Punjab hills, and their coinage is among the earliest attributed to a non-imperial tribal authority in the northwestern subcontinent. The epithet Bhagavata — a devotional term linked to Vaishnava worship — appearing on tribal silver of this period is genuinely unusual, predating the widespread consolidation of Vaishnavism under Gupta patronage by several centuries.

Attribution of Audumbara issues remained contested well into the twentieth century, with early catalogers misassigning pieces to Indo-Greek or Kuninda sequences before tribal punch-marked conventions were better understood.