North Indian Inscriptions

SUPPLEMENTARY INSCRIPTIONS

( Incomplete & Undated )
EULOGY OF SUN-GOD FROM UDAIPUR
( Incomplete & Undater )

THIS inscription was noticed, by M. B. Garde, in the Annual Administrative Report of the Department of Archaeology, former Gwālior State, for the Vikrama year 1977. It is edited here, for the first time, from an inked impression, prepared by the Technical Assistant of the Central Circle of the Survey, to whom my thanks are due.

The inscription is incised on the counterstruck surface of a rectangular slab of stone surrounded by a plain raised border, imbedded in the left hand side of what appears to have been the maṇḍapa of an old temple, at Udaipur in the Vidishā (Bhilsā) District of Madhya Pradesh. This temple, which stands at a little distance to the south of the well known Śiva temple at that place, is now dilapidated, and is owned by a resident of the place, who continued making additions and alteration to it from time to time. It is locally known as Bījāmaṇḍala.^[3] In my visit to the place, I found a number of old images lying helter-skelter in the inner cells of the structure, all to be ascribed to about the time of those carved on the Udayēśvara temple in its vicinity, as stated above.

The inscription consists of eight lines of writing, covering a space 80 cms. long by 26 cms. high, with one akshara in the line that follows. It is incomplete, inspite of the fact that the lower portion of the stone, measuring about half of the whole, is left blank. The reson why the record was not fully engraved is not known ; it may, however, be conjectured from the engraving of the last two lines, where the letters are rather indistinct in comparison with those of the earlier portion, that the sand-stone, on which it is engraved, was probably found unfit to bear the marks of the chisel,^[4] in its lower portion. The size of the letters ranges between 2 and 2.5 cms. A number of them are lost, and some mutilated.

The engraving is fairly deep. The characters are Nāgarī of the twelfth century, and bear a close resemblance to those of the celebrated Udaipur praśasti, edited above. The formation of the letters is also of the same type, more or less also showing the same characteristic feature of the writing, viz., that a short vertical stroke is attached to the left of the top-line of almost all the letters, and occasionally, also to its right. To note the peculiarities of the individual letters,
_______________________

^[1] The syllable in the brackets, which was originally omitted, is engraved just above the preceding letter, and it also appears to have been rubbed off.
^[2] The preceding line is in bigger letter and engraved as separate from the main body, as we find also in No. 51, above. Two of the letters in the line, viz., and may perhaps be explained as the initial aksharas of :. The first of the aksharas in the line, i.e., , is also found in No. 38, l. 14.
^[3] It also goes by the name Ghaḍiyalan-kā-makān ; and from this expression it is inferred that “it was probably the house of the time-keeper or clock-man on the establishment of the great temple”. See D. R. Patil, The Cultural Heritage of Madhya Bhārat (Gwālior, 1952), p. 104. But the word Bījāmaṇḍala, which may have been at the root of the name, appears to have been a corrupt form of Vijayāmaṇḍala, an analogous instance of which is furnished by one at Vidishā, where too we have an inscription, No. 36, above.
^[4] For another incomplete inscription edited here, see above, No. 160, in which case the reasons appear to be different.