North Indian Inscriptions

THE GUPTA ERA

by R. G. Bhandarkar. This record furnishes a clear intimation that the era was then known as the Gupta era, in the verse containing the date. It occupies lines 16-17 and runs as follows: paṁchāśītyā yutē=tītē samānāṁ śata-paṁchakē | Gauptē dadāv=adō nṛipaḥ sōparāgē=rkka-maṁḍalē || “five centuries of years, together with eighty-five, of the Gupta era, having elapsed, the king gave this, when the disc of the sun was eclipsed.” There is no difficulty in disposing finally of the whole bearing of this inscription, notwithstanding the fears of J. F. Fleet to the contrary. It is true that the first plate had been lost, before the grant was obtained for examination at all; as the result of which the genealogy of Jāiṅka is not known. But that does not matter at all. It is also true that the second plate contains no name of a place. That does not, however, compel us to find it in the verse just quoted, as, no doubt, Fleet proposes to do. It is quite possible that the name of the place, or, rather, of the plot of land, granted was mentioned in the first plate. Nay, this seems very probable from the use of the word pratipāditaṁ with which line 4 begins. Pratipāditaṁ, of course, means ‘granted,’ so that it follows that what was granted must have been mentioned in the preceding lines. But, so far as the second plate is concerned, three lines precede it, and they contain no details of the nature of the grant. It is, thus, all but certain that these must have been set forth in the first plate. Secondly, the word actually used is pratipāditaṁ, which is in the neuter. It cannot stand in apposition with any such word as grāmaḥ but, rather, with nivartanaṁ, indicating that what was granted was not so much a village as a measured strip of land. Fleet further argues that the real word “is not gauptē at all, but ithe au being arrived at only by applying again, as a component of the vowel, a perfectly distinct and separate sign, which is in reality nothing but the single mark of punctuation after paṁchakē, at the end of the half-verse, and which had already been properly interpreted as such. It is only by the deliberate correction of ō into au, that the name of the Guptas can be introduced into this passage. . . .” In reply to this criticism, R. G. Bhandarkar says: “I had occasion to look into my old papers, when unexpectedly I found two impressions of the Mōrvī plate taken by Burgess, by beating a slip of thin and soft paper a little moistened into the letters by means of a small brush. In these impressions I do find an indentation on the left side of ग, which is the twelfth letter in the fourth line from the bottom, and a small faintly indented curve connecting it with the upper left hand side flourish of the letter showing that the second stroke necessary for the syllable गौ did exist in the plate. As the original plate is not forthcoming, I have asked Peterson to take charge of these impressions as Secretary of the Bombay Asiatic Society, and deposit them in the Society’s Museum, where they will be available for inspection.” This places beyond even the shadow of a doubt that the correct reading id Gauptē. “But even then” says Fleet, “the adjective occupies a very inconveniently detached position as regards the noun, pañchaka, which it qualifies.” R. G. Bhandarkar has cited many instances from Sanskrit literature where an adjective is placed at the commencement of the second half of a ślōka while the substantive which it qualifies is at the end of the first half. Fleet’s further animadversion on the subject does not, therefore, merit serious consideration. “We might, with just as much reason,” he further remarks, “correct gōptē into gōptrē, ‘to the protector, i.e., the local governor’; and this would be even more sustainable; for the word stands immediately before dadau, ‘he gave’, in connection with which we have every reason to look for a dative, or some other case.” As just pointed out, the reading is unquestionably Gauptē. There is, therefore, no good reason first to assume it as gōptē and then amend it into gōptrē. Secondly, Gauptē, by no means, occupies an irregularly detached position, such as is not infrequently met with in Sanskrit literature. Thirdly, when Fleet asserts that the Mōrvī plate conveys a grant to the governor of the province, he, apparently, betrays ignorance of the contents of the record; for, it unmistakably speaks of two Brāhmaṇa brothers of the Śāṇḍilya gōtra and of the Maitrāyaṇīya śākhā as the grantees. Nay, Fleet proceeds one step further in this fallacious line of