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The Indian Analyst
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North Indian Inscriptions |
SUPPLEMENTARY INSCRIPTIONS
No. 193 ; PLATE CLXIX THIS inscription was discovered by N. P. Chakravarti, Government Epigraphist. A brief notice of it appeared in the Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of India, 1930-34, p. 92. It is edited here, for the first time, from an inked estampage kindly supplied by the Chief Epigraphist. The record is incised on a rock to the right side of the pedestal of a group of sculptures carved on the rock of the so-called Ashṭa Shakti images near the Tarhāon gate in the fort at Ajaygaḍh in the Pannā District of the Vindhya region of Madhya Pradesh. It consists of only one line which is very long, measuring 165 cms. It is carefully engraved and is in a fair state of preservation. The average size of the letters ranges between 2.5 and 3 cms. The characters are of the Nāgarī alphabet resembling those of the stone inscriptions of the time of Bhōjavarman[1]. The top-strokes of letters occasionally show either a crescent or a slanting stroke at the beginning, as in the Dēogaḍh stone inscription of Kīrtivarman.[2] The vowels I and ē show the same peculiarities as in them ; cf, Īśvara and ētāḥ ; the subscript r is written in its complete form with the preceding letter drawn, e.g., in pratimā ; and lastly, the conjunct gg is engraved a gn, as in durgga, as we find in several inscriptions from the region. The language is Sanskrit and the record is in prose throughout. The orthography does not call for any special remark. The inscription opens with an obeisance to Kēdāra, i.e., Śiva. Following this, it records that one Suhaḍadēva caused to be made (carved) the images of Kēdāra and Pārvatī, Vṛishabha, Kṛishṇā, Ambikā, Tārā, Tripurā, Kāmākshyā, Durgā, Harasiddhi, Aindrī, Chāmuṇḍā, Kālikā, and again Īśvara and Pārvatī. The images, as already noted by Chakravarti, are all found in the neighbourhood on the rock and most of them also bear separate lables.
The inscription mentions the pedigree of Suhaḍadēva. It tells us that he was the son of Ṭhakkura Ashau, the grandson of the Ṭhakkura Vāśē and the great-grandson of the Ṭhakkura Vīdana, who was in charge of the Jayapura-durga, along with its gate-house (pratōlī). The same genealogy of Suhaḍadēva is also found in the undated Ajaygaḍh stone inscription of the time of Bhōjavarman ;[3] and thus he is undoubtedly the same persons as Subhaṭa called therein, and the Superintendent of the Treasury and the Chief Minister of the king. The date of the inscription, which is recorded in the end, is (V.) S. 1344, in the month of Vaiśākha, in its dark half. The figure for the week-day is not clear but we are also told that it was a Saturday. And presuming the figure for the date to be nine, as it resembles the unit figure of the year in line 32 of No 114, above, the date would regularly correspond to Saturday, 27th March, 1288 A.C., for the Kārttikādi Vikrama expired and the pūrṇimata month. The name of the king is not mentioned in the present record, but it definitely belongs to the time of the same Chandēlla king whose latest known date is V.S. 1346,[4] which is also the earliest known date of his successor Hammīravarman, as we know from the latter’s Charkhari grant.[5] The inscription closes with the expression Śubham = astu. On the basis of the dates of both these rulers, Chakravarti guesses that Bhōjavarman was not a usurper, as conjectured by Hiralal, but that he had only a short reign of 3 or 4 years, and possibly he was a younger brother of Vīravarman and reigned only during the minority of Hammīravarman. And this is probably the reason why his name has been omitted in the
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