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The Indian Analyst
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South Indian Inscriptions |
INCRIPTIONS OF THE KALACHURIS OF TRIPURI
NO. 54; PLATE XLIII B THIS is a single copper-plate which, together with its ring and seal, was presented by Sir A. W. Franks to the British Museum, London, and is now preserved in that Museum. It seems to have been discovered somewhere in the Uttar Pradesh, but its exact findspot is not known. It is edited here for the first time from excellent photostat copies kindly supplied by the Director of the Museum. This is the first of the two copper-plates forming a set, which recorded the grant of some Kalachuri king of Tripurī, probably Karņa, the son of Gāngēyadēva. It measures I' 5½" broad and 12¼" high. It has a ring and a large seal 3½" in diameter. The weight of the plate is 10 lbs. and that of the ring and seal 6 lbs. and 1 oz. The writing on it is in a state of excellent preservation. The plate is inscribed on one side only. It has a hole 1" in diameter at the bottom of the inscribed side for the ring which must have originally held together the two plates of the set. The plate contains twenty-one lines of writing. The average size of the letters is .4". The seal, though it resembles that of the Goharwa plates in the disposition of the figures, symbols and legend on it, was evidently cast from a different mould. The figures of Lakshmī and the elephants are much better executed here than on the seal of the Goharwa plates.1
The characters are of the Nāgarī alphabet, and generally resemble those of the Goharwa plates. Some of the individual letters like ś and bh are, however, shaped as in the Banaras plates; the upper loop of th is slightly open in –pathagān=, 1.12 and the sign of avagraha occurs once only in 1.13. The record is very carelessly written. The writer has confused y, s and bh, as well as t and bh. In one case he has not even incised an akshara completely. See tū in –tūrya-, 1.14. In a few places the record is so corrupt, that it would have been well-nigh impossible to restore the correct text without the help of the Goharwa plates. But strange as it might appear, the present record has helped in the restoration of verse 9 which though it occurs in both the Goharwa plates and the Rewa stone inscription2 is incorrectly written in the former and is partly mutilated in the latter. The language is Sanskrit and except for the word siddhih in the beginning, the extant portion is wholly in verse. There are, in all, twenty-one verses, of which the first twenty are completely written. The record breaks off after the first two aksharas of the second half of the twenty-first verse. The orthography shows the usual peculiarties of the substitution of v for b and s for ś, the reduplication of a consonant after r and so forth.
The record, so far as it goes, is identical with the Goharwa plates. The genealogy
of the donor is traced from the moon down to Karņa, the son of Gāngēyadēva. On the
present plate the inscription ends abruptly in the middle of the description of Karņa and
before the commencement of the formal part of the grant. It is not, therefore, possible
to say definitely who actually made the grant. But, as the draft of the eulogistic, portion
of the Goharwa plates, which is used here, is not known to have been adopted by any
successors of Karņa, the present grant was probably made by Karņa himself. As the
second plate is not forthcoming, all details such as the object, occasion and date of
the grant are lost.
1Above, No. 50. |
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