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South Indian Inscriptions |
INCRIPTIONS OF THE KALACHURIS OF TRIPURI TRANSLATION Success ! Ōm ! Adoration ! [Siva], the Balādhikŗita of the illustrious Śabara . . . . . . has given the cess at the threshing floor1 and a granary for the holy Śankaranārāyaņa to . . . . . . the ascetic residing in the temple (which is the only one) in the entire settlement of the Brāhmaņas2 venerated by . . . . . (Line 4) Whoever will deviate from this, for him is this (our) imprecation that he shall incur the sin of killing a Brāhmaņa . . . . . No. 44; THIS inscription was discovered by Mr. Beglar3, one of the Assistants of Sir A. Cunningham at Chandrēhi or Chandrēhē4 (long. 810 32' E. and lat. 240 18' N.), a small village about a mile from the right bank of the Śōņa close to its confluence with the Banās, in the District of Rewa, in Vindhya Pradesh. The record was first noticed by Dr. Keilhorn in the Indian Antiquary, Vol. XX, p. 85, and again in the Epigraphia Indica, Vol. I, p. 354, n. 1. A transcript of its text, together with a translation, was given by Mr. R. D. Banerji in his Haihayas of Tripurī and their Monuments (Memoirs of the Archæological Survey of India, No. 23), pp. 110 ff. The same scholar subsequently edited it, with a lithograph and a translation, in the Epigraphia Indica, Vol. XXI, pp. 148 ff. It is edited here from excellent estampages kindly supplied by the Government Epigraphist for India.
The record is incised on two slabs of stone ‘which are let into the back-wall
of the front verandah of the monastery, one on each side of the main door . . . . The
inscribed surface is a sunken panel with a plain border, which is, on the whole, in a very
good state of preservation.’5 The record consists of twenty-seven lines, of which fourteen
are inscribed on the first stone (marked A, below) and thirteen on the second (marked
B). The average size of the letters is 1”. The characters are of the Nāgarī alphabet and
show some development over those of the Kārītalāi inscription of Lakshmaņarāja II.6 Kh and g, for instance, show an acute-angled triangle in their left limb; dh, on the other
hand, shows no development in its left limb, but closely resembles v, expect that it has
no line at the top ; two forms of k are used, one generally in ligatures, see –kvaņad–, 1.5,
kshaņam, 1. 13, and the other elsewhere ; th has a vertical on the right; ph exhibits two
forms ; for the first, which is developed from the old type, see phaņi-, 1. 1, -phaņ-īśvara-,
1.4 and –dvirēpha-,1.20, and for the second, which survives in the later Nāgarī, see sphārī-, 1 Khala-bhikshā, lit. ‘alms at a threshing floor’, was probably a tax in kind which was paid to the state
when the corn was threshed. The right to receive the contribution seems to have been transferred to the
donee. Whether the cess at one or all the threshing floors in the particular locality was conferred on the
donee, the record does not make clear. The Kārītalāi stone inscription (above, No. 42) refers in line 34 to
the donation of four khalabhikshās.
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