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The Indian Analyst
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North Indian Inscriptions |
SUPPLEMENTARY INSCRIPTIONS bad. Being interested in its date, I visited the place with the kind permission of the Director. General of Archaeology in India, and studied the inscription in situ, on 8-3-1973. The record was edited by me, for the first time, form the original and a photo-copy kindly supplied to me by Prof, Pathak, in the Journal of the Andhra Historical Research Society, Vol. XXXV, pp. 231-32. From the same photograph, it is edited here. The inscription is incised on one of the facets of a dwarf rectangular pillar of land sandstone, about 95 cms, high, now set on a platform of mud and stone, in front of the General Post Office in Kōṭhī Bazār Mohallā at Hoshangābād, the chief town of a district of the same name in Madhya Pradesh. I found the pillar obliquely resting against the lower part of a tree, with a part of it imbedded in the earth below so as to hide its lower portion. The writing, which consists of seven lines of crude engraving, covers a space 28cms, high by 22 cms. broad. The script is Nāgarī, and the language is Sanskrit, all written in prose. In respect of orthography nothing is worth nothing except that sha is spelt as kha in paukha, in l. 1. The inscription refers itself to the reign of the illustrious Mahākumāra Hariśchandra, and its purpose is to record the death of a hero, as also can be known from some figures carved in relief on all the sides of the pillar[1]. The name of the hero, which was engraved before suta in l. 5, cannot be made out ; but that he certainly lost his life in an encounter is suggested by the word yudhītya (for yuddhvā) in the last line. The letters giving his father’s name are also equally indistinct. The date of the record, as given only in figures in the beginning, is the 5th day of the bright fortnight of Pausha of the (Vikrama) year 1243, and the day is mentioned as Thursday. The date regularly corresponds to 18th December, 1186 A.C., taking the year as expired and the month beginning with the full moon.
The royal family to which Hariśchandra belonged is not mentioned in the inscription ; but his designation Mahākumāra shows him to have been the homonymous Paramāra ruler whose two inscriptions, one of which was found at Bhōpāl and the other at Pipliānagar, are dated respectively, in V. 1214 (1157 A.C.) and V. 1235 (1178 A.C.).[2] From both these years we know that the Paramāra Mahākumāra Hariśchandra was on the throne at least for 21 years, which is the average period generally calculated for the reign of a king ; and accordingly, this king appears to have closed his reign soon after he issued the second grant. The historical value of the present inscription, however, lies in indicating that Hariśchandra continued to rule for at least about eight years thereafter, thus making the interrugnum between himself and his son Udayavarman still shorter, as the latter of these rulers is known only from his grant of V, 1256 (1200 A.C.).[3] There is no evidence to know anything about the struggle in which the hero mentioned in our inscription lost his life. But the political situation of the time reveals that the Yādava Bhillama V, who ascended the throne in 1185 A.C. and thus only a year before the present record was issued, was carrying on military expeditions in the north, and it is not impossible that in the course of his invasions he had also to face the Paramāra Vindhyavarma, who had only shortly before this date relieved Mālava from the Gujrat[4] sovereignty and who may have endeavoured to check the Yādava forces. The Mutgi stone inscription of the reign of Bhillama, dated 1189 A.C., describes the Yādava ruler as “a severe pain in the head of the Mālavas;[5] and this appears to have been the encounter mentioned in the present inscription.[6] No geographical name occurs in the inscription. ______________________ | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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in No. 47, v. 12.