South Indian Inscriptions

EPIGRAPHIA INDICA

fortunately no impression reached me as a result of the correspondence. About the beginning of November in the same year, Dr. B. Ch. Chhabra happened to visit Bhubaneswar in the course of a tour that side. He inspected the Bhadrak stone inscription in the Orissa State Museum and copied it. After his return to Ootacamund, Dr. Chhabra was kind enough to place at my disposal all the impressions of the above inscription for examination. He also permitted me to edit the record in the pages of the Epigraphia Indica. I take this opportunity to thank him for his kindness. My thanks are also due to Mr. S. C. De for information regarding the discovery of the inscription. “I discovered the inscription”, Mr. De subsequently wrote to me, “in the courtyard of the temple of Bhadrakālī in a locality about five miles from the town of Bhadrak in the Bhadrak Sub-Division on the 17th of March 1951. I noticed the stone buried in the earth and learnt that pilgrims used to wash their feet on it. Certain scars on the stone attracted my attention. I then dug it out and found the inscription. In the month of June we managed to bring the stone to the Museum. Its upper part is damaged as the villagers used to sharpen their axes on it. I was told that the stone had been brought to the Bhadrakālī temple from an adjoining village some years back. The temple of Bhadrakālī is an ordinary thatched cottage. So the stone was probably the lintel of some other temple.”

The stone bears an inscription in three lines and is unfortunately broken here and there. The state of preservation of the writing is unsatisfactory. A number of letters in all the three lines have either completely or partially broken away, while some aksharas in line 1 have suffered considerably from the effect of corrosion. This corrosion is apparently due to the stone being used as an axe-sharpener. The writing covers a space about 44 inches in length and about 7 inches in height. Individual aksharas are about 1·5 inches in height.

The characters resemble those of the so-called eastern variety of the Gupta alphabet, of which the test letters are m, s and h. Of the three letters, m and h in our record are almost as developed as in the Allahabad pillar inscription^[1] of Samudragupta (middle of the fourth century A. C.), although in one case m seems to exhibit an earlier form. The letter s has its earlier form found usually in the inscriptions of the age of the Kushāṇas. The form of l resembles that of the same letter as found in the Allahabad pillar inscription, while letters like k, ṇ, etc., show pre-Gupta forms. The letter ṇ resembles in form the same letter as found in some Mathurā inscriptions of the first and second centuries A.C. and reproduced by Ojha in his Palaeography of India (in Hindi), 1918, Plate VI, i (cf. the fourth form of ṇ). In a few cases medial ā and ē seem to be written by lengthening slightly the top mātrā of the consonant respectively towards the right and the left. The inscription exhibits the initial vowel a and the symbols for the numerals 3, 8 and 80. On grounds of palaeography, the inscription may be assigned to the period between the age of the Kushāṇas and the of the Guptas. I am inclined to assign it to a date about the second half of the third century A.C. This date seems to be supported also by the language of the record.

The language of the inscription is Prakrit. We know that originally the epigraphic language of the whole of India was Prakrit, that Sanskrit is first sound in North Indian epigraphs about the beginning of the Christian era and that it gradually ousted Prakrit from the field of Indian epigraphy. The suppression of Sanskrit by Prakrit in the epigraphic records of the lower part of South India took place as late as the middle of the fourth century A.C. In the early Prakrit inscriptions, double consonants are found to be represented by single letters ; but gradually the influence of Sanskrit became noticeable in the Prakrit records, not only in their use of double consonants, but also in the occasional inclusion of Sanskritic sounds, words and passages. From a study of the Prakrit inscriptions of the various dynasties holding sway over South India, we find

_________________________________________________

^[1] Fleet’s Gupta Inscriptions (CII, Vol. III), pp. 1ff. ; and Sircar’s Select Inscriptions, Vol. I, pp. 254 ff.