North Indian Inscriptions

INSCRIPTIONS OF THE CHANDELLAS OF JEJAKABHUKTI

No. 131 ; PLATE CXVIII

PACHHĀR COPPER-PLATE INSCRIPTION OF PARAMARDIDĒVA

[Vikrama] Year 1233

THE copper-plate on which this inscription is engraved is said to have been found some time in the third quarter of the last century, by one Gaṇēśjū, in course of excavating the foundation of his house at Pachhār, a village about 20 kms. north by east of Jhānsī, the headquarters of a District of the same name in Uttar Pradesh. The record was edited by Arthur Venis in the Epigraphia Indica, Vol. X (1909-10), pp. 44 ff., with a facsimile. It is edited here from inked impressions kindly supplied to me, at my request, by the Director of the Provincial Museum, Lucknow, to which the original plate was presented by the Zamindār of the village and where it is now exhibited.¹³

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¹ Originally mē, changed later on to yē.
² The letters forming the name cannot be read with certainly.
³ The gōtra usually appears as Saṅkṛiti, and its pravaras as Sāṅkṛitya, Āṅgirasa and Gaurīvīta (not –vrata)- See Gōtrapravaranibandha-kadamba, p. 44.
⁴ The ten aksharas ending with this are omitted in Hiralal’s transcript.
⁵ The bracketed akshara, is defectively formed.
⁶ Hiralal read , but it is due to the fault in engraving.
⁷ The two letters in the bracket are indistinct. Hiralal read this expression as, in the sense, according to him, ‘together with forests, mines and hollows’. It appears as in the Sēmrā grant (l. 118).
⁸ This letter has an additional redundant stroke at the end.
⁹ The daṇḍa is redundant.
¹⁰ The subscript of this letter looks like , with the loop of .
¹¹ A kāka-pāda sign appears at the end of this line.
¹² It is not known if the sign marking m is hidden below the band, and what looks like the sign of anusvāra above this akshara may be a redundant stroke of the chisel, as there are some others.
¹³ The exact spot of the discovery of the plates is not known ; but the presumption of Venis that “it was somewhere on the raised mound (consisting of the usual debris of old houses, etc.) on which the village stands” may be taken to be true till we find anything to the contrary. In my visit to the Museum at Lucknow for examining the inscriptions exhibited there, in January 1973. I found recorded in the Register that this plate,
which is catalogued as No. E-45, was presented by a Brāhmaṇa, named Bindraban of Pachhār, through Mr. Silberrad, I.C.S., and reached the
Museum on the 5th December, 1908. The information is due to Mr. V.N. Shrivastava, Curator of the Museum, to whom I am thankful.