North Indian Inscriptions

THE GUPTA INSCRIPTIONS

Gupta characters of the 5th century A.D. It is written on one side only of the plate, which is now very much corroded. In length, the full plate seems to have been almost twice the fragment now preserved, which measures 5-¼" by 5-½". Almost the whole of the proper right half of the plate is broken and lost, together with the upper right and lower left corners. From an examination of the portions of the writing preserved in lines 14-16, which from part of the well-known imprecatory verses, it can be ascertained that about a dozen and a half letters are cut off from the proper right side of each of the lines. This loss of almost half of the inscribed portion and the extremely blurred state of the letters preserved are the greatest obstacles in explaining the document. But the five Dāmōdarpur grants and the four Faridpur grants have helped us much in deciding that the present plate also, like them, is not an ordinary royal land-grant, but is a sale-deed embodying the record of a purchase of land for the purpose of donation. Banerji states that the fragments of the proper upper right corner, broken in the exhibition grounds of the Calcutta Industrial Exhibition of 1906-07, contained the two letters ma and ra, which, he thinks, were evidently the second and third syllables of the name of the emperor Kumāragupta. Then inscription is dated, in 113, which must be referred to the Gupta era, and this evidently proves that it belonged to the time of the Gupta monarch Kumāragupta I. The language of the inscription is Sanskrit, and it is in prose throughout excepting in lines 14-16, which contain three damaged imprecatory verses in the Anushṭubh metre. Banerji’s statement that “the bad state of preservation makes it very difficult to make any remarks on the orthography” cannot be upheld: for, the following points in respect of orthography were easily observed by Basak :

(1 ) as in the Dāmōdarpur copper-plates, the sign of the medial ā is attached by a hook-like sign towards the bottom of the lower right of some of the letters, especially of kh, g and ṇ, e.g., khāsaka line 5, khādā(ṭa?)pāra-line 7; grām-āshṭa- line 6; and guṇāguṇa-line 13;
(2) the sign of avagraha is not used, as in vishayē=nuvṛitta- line 7;
(3) the letters g, n, t, m, y and v (and not sh, e.g., varsha- line 15) are doubled with a preceding r, e.g., vargga-line 4, svarggē line 15; utkīrṇṇam line 17; kīrtti line 4; śarmma line 3 and line 5, dharmma line 8; -maryyādā- line 7; and –pūrvva line 2 and line 16, sarvva line 9;
(4) m has sometimes been joined with the following pa and va, e.g., in svadattām-para-dattām=vā line 14; and
(5) k has been doubled with a following r,e.g.,in kkramēna(ṇa) line 8.

        The forms of the initial vowels ā, i and u are seen in the following words respectively, āyuktaka line 11, iha line 7, and utkīrṇṇam line 17. The form of the letter mē in kkramēna(ṇa) line 8, sarvvam= ēkam line 11, is to be noticed. For a similar incision of mē, especially the ē mark in it, we may compare the words kāvyam=ēthām line 31 of the Allahābād pillar inscription of- Samudragupta, No. 1 above, and guhām=ētām line 5 (above, No. 11), and the word dōsha-grāmō line 1 (wrongly read as dās-āgrēṇa by Hara Prasad Sastri) of the Susuniā rock inscription.¹

       In his paper “The Five Damodarpur copper-plate inscriptions of the Gupta period”,² Basak made a remark at the outset that those sale-deeds, which the present inscription resembles, “may be regarded as having roughly six different parts in the form in which they are drawn up.” The same remark, he says, holds good with regard to this inscription also. The first part ends with the word vijñāpitā- line 7, the second with dā[tum] line 8, the third with tad= avadhṛitam=iti yatas line 10, the fourth with ēkam dattaṁ line 11, the fifth with –Varāha-svāminō dattaṁ line 12, and the sixth with the rest of the grant. We agree with him.
__________________________________________

¹ Ep. Ind., Vol. XIII, p. 133.
² Ibid., Vol.XV, pp. 113 ff.