South Indian Inscriptions

EPIGRAPHIA INDICA

SIDDHESWAR INSCRIPTION OF NARASIMHA IV ; ANKA YEAR 19

(1 Plate)

D. C. SIRCAR, Ootacamund, and K. B. TRIPATHI, Cuttack

Amongst the tracts where the NIA dialects are spoken, Orissa offers a unique opportunity to the students of Indo-Aryan linguistics. Numerous are the epigraphic records left by the rulers of Orissa who flourished before the Muhammadan conquest of the country about the middle of the sixteen century. Distinct traces of the influence of the Oriya language and orthography are noticed in such early inscriptions as the Madras Museum plates^[1] of the time of Narendradhavala,^[2] which are written in quasi-Sanskrit and are assignable to the tenth century A.C., while epigraphs written in the Oriya language are found in fairly large numbers since the fourteenth century. Although Orissan inscriptions of the age of the imperial Gaṅgas, whether their language is Sanskrit or Oriya, were usually written in the Gauḍīya (the socalled proto-Bengali) script, which is the mother of the Oriya alphabet, we have, from the fourteenth century, epigraphs showing fairly developed characteristics of the Oriya script. Unfortunately medieval Orissan records, written in the Oriya language and alphabet, have been very rarely published with facsimiles and accurate transcripts. In the editor’s preface to the South Indian Inscriptions, Vol. V, 1925, H. Krishna Sastri, the Government Epigraphist for India, observes, “ Of these last (i.e., the Oriya records transcribed in the volume, Nos. 1006, 1119, 1152 and 1161), the texts given have to be considered as tentative since there are no published inscriptions in this language and script to afford comparison and since scholars capable of handling them are also few.” Of course, some early Oriya inscriptions were published by M. M. Chakravarti without facsimiles in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. LXII, Part I, 1893, pp. 90 ff. ; cf. ibid., Vol. LXIV, Part I, 1895, pp. 149 ff. Another Oriya inscription from Bhubaneswar was published with Plate in the same journal in 1924 (pp. 41 ff.) by G. Sircar ; but the characters of this record are early Bengali. The Balasore copper axe-head inscription of the Sūryavaṁśī monarch Purushottama (circa 1470-96 A.C.) published by Beames in the Indian Antiquary, Vol. I, 1872, p. 355, and by E. A. Gait in the Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society, Vol. IV, 1918, p. 363, is the only early inscription written in the Oriya language and alphabet, of which both a facsimile and an accurate transcript are available to the students of Oriya palaeography and linguistics. Krishna Sastri’s remarks about the paucity of satisfactorily edited early Oriya inscriptions remain substantially true even today. The transcripts of the large number of Oriya records since published without facsimiles in the South Indian Inscriptions, Vol. VI, 1928, are by no means remarkable for their accuracy. No apology is therefore needed for editing in the following pages an interesting inscription of the fourteenth century, which is written in the Oriya language and alphabet and is one of the earlier of such records so far discovered.

The village of Siddheswar lies in the vicinity of Jajpur (ancient Virajā-tīrtha) on the river Vaitaraṇī in the Cuttack District of Orissa. The name of the locality is derived from that of the deity Siddheśvara (Śiva in the Liṅga form) whose temple is the only attraction in the area. There is a stone vṛisha-stambha standing in the courtyard of the said temple, although the figure of the bull is missing. The pillar bears an inscription, the preservation of which is unfortunately not quite satisfactory. The record is engraved around a section of the pillar, which is tapering upwards. It occupies a space about 54 inches at the top and 63 inches at the bottom in length and 7 inches at the left end and 6 inches at the right in breadth. The writing is

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^[1] Above, Vol. XXVIII, pp. 44 ff.
^[2] [In deference to the authors’ wishes, macron over e and o is not used at all in this article, as in Oriya these vowels, say the authors, are often short.─Ed.]