North Indian Inscriptions

SUPPLEMENTARY INSCRIPTIONS

No. 200 ; PLATE CLXXVI
SĀWARGĀON STONE INSCRIPTION OF THE TIME OF JAGADDĒVA
( Undated )

THE stone bearing this inscription was discovered by Doctor A.M. Shiralkar, an officer in charge of registering antiquities in the State Department of Archaeology in Mahārāshṭra. The same scholar also published the record in the Indian History and Culture, a Quarterly Journal in Marāṭhī (Bombay), in its issue of January, 1973, on pp. 44-49, with the text but without a facsimile.

About ten years thereafter, the inscription was edited by Prof. V. B. Kolte of Nagpur, with his own reading of it from an impression sent to him by Shri Kawadkar, Officer in charge of archaeology of Mahārāshṭra State, stationed at Aurangābād. Kolte’s article, in which he corrected Shiralkar’s reading of some important interpretations, is published in the Vidarbha Research Society’s Annual for 1973, pp. 73 ff., with a lithograph. From the same lithograph the inscription is edited here.

The slab bearing the inscription is said to have been found at Sāwargāon, also known by its longer name Rāni Sāwargāon a village in the Parbhaṇī District of the Marāthawāḍā region of Mahārāshṭra. Its exact find-spot is not known.^[9] The writing covers an almost squarish

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^[1] These three aksharas are mutilated beyond recognition, and the traces show that they may have been .
^[2] This akshara appears as , followed by a daṇḍa ; but it gives no meaning.
^[3] The fourth akshara in this foot is required to be long. Probably we have to read it as (Sanskrit). 4 Should we read it is ?
^[5] Both these aksharas are mutilated beyond recognition. The lacunae may be filled in by reading
^[6] It is doubtful whether it is the sign of visarga, or jihvāmūlīya.
^[7] The marks show that all these letters are either mutilated or misformed. They cannot be made out.
^[8] The reading of this singular akshara in this line is not certain. It is followed by a flowery design
and a double daṇḍa, as marked here, but the inscription is incomplete, as already stated above.
^[9] I could not obtain Shiralkar’s article on the inscription, and Kolte’s writing is the only source of my information on this subject.