North Indian Inscriptions

INSCRIPTIONS OF THE CHANDELLAS OF JEJAKABHUKTI

SĀGAR COPPER-PLATE INSCRIPTION OF TRAILŌKYAVARMAN

No.142 ; PLATE CXXIX

SĀGAR COPPER-PLATE INSCRIPTION OF TRAILŌKYAVARMAN

[Vikrama] Year 1264

THIS inscription is on a single plate of copper which was found by Pt. Govind Sitaram Harshe, in course of digging a pit in his house, in 1943, in the Lakshmīpurā mohallā of Sāgar the headquarters of a district in Madhya Pradesh. The epigraph was noticed in the Annual Report on Indian Epigraphy of the Archaeological Survey of India, for the year 1946-47, and was edited by B. M. Barua and P. B. Chakravarti, in the Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. XXIII (1947), pp. 46 ff., and was re-edited, with a lithograph, by Dr. Sant Lal Katare in the Epigraphia Indica, Vol. XXXI (1957-58), pp. 70 ff.,² from an impression supplied to him by S. S. Patwardhan who was then the Curator of the Central Museum, Nagpur, where the plate is now deposited,³ and the impression supplied to me by the Chief Epigrahist,² and another, by Shri V. P. Rode, the present Curator of the Museum, to whom my thanks are due.

It is a thick plate measuring 36∙2 cms. by 26∙67 cms., and is inscribed on one side only. It weighs 3 kgms. and 208 grms. It contains small round holes bored at intervals, on all the four sides, indicating that strips of copper were at some time fastened by rivets along its edges, to protect the writing, as to be seen on some other plates issued by the Chandēlla kings ; but the strips were destroyed some time subsequently. The inscription contains 19 lines of writing, and the aksharas are all well preserved, except in the last one which has altogether been broken with the lower left corner of the plate, and a few of the aksharas are damaged but can be made out with some perseverance, in two or three lines in the middle of the plate, which was vertically bent when received but had to be straightened.

The first four lines of the inscription are divided by the figure of a seated Gaja-Lakshmī engraved at the top, as we find generally in the charters issued by the house to which the present inscription also belongs, The letters are not of the uniform size, their average height being about 1∙3 cms. in the first six lines, but from the seventh line their size is reduced and in the last 2-3 lines they are almost half of this size.
Since much of the space available on the plate was in the beginning covered by a small portion of the text, the rest of the document was
crammed into a much smaller space.

The script used is Nāgarī, resembling that of the immediately preceding Garrā plates and showing more or less the same sort of palaeographical peculiarities, e.g., a confusion between the forms of ch and v, and occasionally between that of these letters and of r, e.g., in śirō- and narēndra-, both in l.1, chāṭa- in l. 10, and -chara- in l.16, The letter ṅ continues to be without its dot, the conjunct gg is written as gn and the subscript ṇ as l, e.g., in jaṅgama, l. 9,nirggama, l.15, and Kṛishṇa-, l. 11, respectively. And lastly, dh marks a transitional state, appearing sometimes as v as in vādhā, l.17, where we also note the verticals joined by a stroke, while in the other instances its left limb has a horn above, which is sometimes joined to the preceding
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¹ The reading from ma to the end in this line is as taken by Dikshit. But it is conjectural as all these aksharas are concealed beneath the copper-band.
². In his article Katare called it as ‘the Ṭehri plate’, but as rightly remarked by the editor of the Ep. Ind., while publishing the article, I prefer to name it as the Sāgar plate, after its find-spot. The record was also edited, with a photolithograph, by B.C. Jain, in Vindhyabhūmi (a Hindi magazine from Rēwā). in its special issue on archaeology. 1955, on pp. 51∙52.
³.It is his No. 50 of 1946-47.