North Indian Inscriptions

SPURIOUS SUDI PLATES.

......The extraordinary Harihar grant, which, as Mr. Rice himself has said, included certainly two, if not three alphabets,— or, rather, attempts at alphabets,— is made up of characters which, for the most part, baffle any attempt at serious criticism. It is sufficient to say that among them there are some of the most modern Nâgarî or Bâlbôdh forms,─ note particularly the k and y. and the p and m in one of their varieties ; and that the fabrication of the record must be placed even later than that of the Tanjore grant. So clumsily dense was the ignorance of the man who concocted it, that the kh and ṇḍ of khaṇḍita, line 3, are actually formed backwards. And the nature of the whole document is such that, but for the previously published records, the greater part of it could not have been deciphered at all.¹

......The earlier Mallohaḷḷi grant, No. 3, aims throughout at an old type of characters. But they are so indifferently formed, all through, that,— taking this feature in connection with the corruptness of the orthography,— the spurious nature of the record, and its late origin, cannot be doubted for a moment. I am not at present prepared to fix the earliest date possible for the fabrication of it. But I do not doubt that it was concocted at least as late as the Merkara grant and the other garant from Mallohaḷḷi.

......The Merkara grant, purporting to have been issued in A.D. 466, was considered by Dr. Burnell to be “the earliest unquestionable inscription a yet known” (loc. cit. p. 34) ; and from it he framed what he called a Chêra alphabet of A.D. 467 (see his Plate ii.). But, when Dr. Burnell wrote, comparatively little was known was about the palæography of southern and western India. Any practised eye will now see, at a glance, that the record is of much later date than that to which it pretends. And, on closer inspection, it is definitely betrayed by a character which furnishes a leading test in dealing with southern records. The letter kh occurs in it six times,— in khaḍga and khaṇḍita, line 2, in mukhade, lines 24, 26-27, and 29, and in likhitam, at the end ; and, in each case, the form that is used is the later or cursive form, which, elsewhere, in Dr. Burnell’s tables, appears first in his Plate vi., the alphabet in which is taken from a copper-plate grant of the Eastern Chalukya king Amma II., issued in or soon after A.D. 945 (Ind. Ant. Vol. VII. p. 15, and lithograph ; for the kh, see khalu, line 24, âkhyaḥ, line 25, and likhitaṁ, line 64). As a matter of fact, this later form of the kh is carried back to the time of the Râshṭrakûṭa king Amôghavarsha I. (A.D. 814-15 and 876-78) : for, though only the earlier form appears in the Śirȗr inscription of that king, dated in A.D. 866,² the later form,— and it only,— appears in an inscription of the same king, dated in A.D. 865, at Mantrawâḍi near Baṅkapur.³ But it does not seem at all possible that it can be carried back to before A.D. 804 : for, the older form only is used in the Kanarese grant of Gôvinda III., the predecessor of Amôghavarsha I., dated in that year (Ind. Ant. Vol. XI. p. 126, and lithograph ; see the words vaisâkha, line 2, and likhitam, line 19) ; and the same form,— the older one,— is the only one Wokkalêri grant of the Western Chalukya king Kîrtivarnam II., dated in A.D. 757 ( Ind. Ant. Vol. VIII. P. 23, and lithograph).⁴ And thus we arrive at the beginning of the ninth century A.D., as the earliest possible period for the concoction of the record.⁵
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......¹ As regards this record, see, further, page 166 below, under the mention of Vishṅugôpa and Mâdhava II.
......² Ind. Ant. Vol. XII. p. 215. A lithograph of this record has not published yet. I quote from the ink-impression.
......³ Here, again, I quote from an ink-impression.
......⁴ I have not thought it worth while to spend time in examining the still earlier records in the same class of characters ; being quite certain that in them there will be found only the older form of the kh, and also of the b which I have to comment on in connection with the next record.— The facts seem to shew that the introduction of the later or cursive forms of these two characters into epigraphic records was connected with the encouragement that was given to Jain literature in the time of Amôghavarsha I.
......⁵ It may be noted here that, as the grantees named in spurious charters were probably always real persons, there may be a means of determining the actual date of the fabrication of this record, in the names, which it contains, of Jain teachers belonging to the Dêsiga-Gaṇa in the line of Koṇḍakuṇḍa.