North Indian Inscriptions

INSCRIPTIONS OF THE CHANDELLAS OF JEJAKABHUKTI

No. 112 ; PLATE CIV

AJAYAGAḌH ROCK INSCRIPTION OF THE TIME OF KĪRTTIVARMAN

(Undated)

THIS inscription was found by Alexander Cunningham in the touring season of 1883-84 and was noticed by him in his Archaeological Survey of India Reports, Volume XXI, p. 54 (Pl.), where he says that the inscription consists of four lines and contains the name of Kīrttivarman in the last line. The record was again noticed by N. P. Chakravarti in the Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of India, for the year 1935-36, p. 92; and from an ink-impression applied by the Government Epigraphist for India, it was edited by Dr. Sant Lal Katare, in the Epigraphia Indica, Volume XXX, pp. 87 ff., with the text in Nāgarī and Plate (facing p. 90). From the same plate the subjoined transcript is prepared.

The inscription is engraved above a group of female images on a rock lying below the upper gate of the fort of Ajayagaḍh, situated by the side of the chief town of a parganā of the
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¹ Originally incised as and later on the curve above the top-stroke was attempted to alter so as to form a mātrā.
2 Kielhorn remarked that the superscript of rbhū was omitted while engraving, but in the impression before me it is very clear. This verse has a pun on the word agada meaning (1) free from disease and (2) without the gadā, mace.
³ Kielhorn read the bracketed letter as d and corrected it to.
⁴ Above this letter is a fault of the stone appearing as an anusvāra sign.
⁵ Both the bracketed aksharas are rather peculiar ; the fore-part of the first was probably formed as the of y and subsequently corrected, and the second appearing as . In the following -, n appears as t.
⁶ The subscript of appears more like .
⁷ This akshara looks somewhat like but it is as I have taken it here.
⁸ The fourth pāda of this verse obstructs against the metre ślōka, though it is a different type of anushṭubh. ⁹ Kielhorn says that the subscript is formed as o but in the impression before me it is clearly the same as taken here.
¹⁰ This akshara is a combination of the palatal and the dental sibilants.
¹¹ The vowel attached to the bracketed letter is clearly u and the consonant of the following letter, though indistinct and cramped, is ś, marking the whole akshara to be śu and not ba, as it was read by Hultzsch in Ind. Ant., Vol. XI, p. 311. And thus I agree with Kielhorn who
observes that perhaps this letter was at first omitted and was inserted on revision and this is why it appears as a visarga in Cunningham’s
photozincograph. In the impression the two circles, as of ś (and not v) are clear.
¹² The tail of is curved to the left.