South Indian Inscriptions

EPIGRAPHIA INDICA

pataka (i.e. a sub-district called Bhṛiṅgārikā consisting of sixty-four villages) governed by a Daṇḍa (i.e. Daṇḍanāyaka) probably having his headquarters at Udayapura (i.e. Udayapur, the findspot of the record). The name of the district was no doubt derived from that of its chief city which again assumed the name of the deity worshiped there.

In 1233 or 1234 A.D., Sultān Iltutmish of Delhi sent of led an army against Malwa and the Muhammadans ‘ took the fort and city of Bhīlsā or Bhīlasān ’. While describing the said expedition, Minhājuddīn’s Tabaqāt-i-Nāsirī^[1] says that, at Bhīlsā, the Muhammadans destroyed a temple which was one hundred and five gaz in height. The same work seems to indicate that the temple was built three hundred years earlier thus referring its construction to a date about the tenth century, although, as indicated above, we have now evidence regarding the existence of the Bhāillasvāmin temple at Bhīlsā as early as the second half of the ninth century. However, the glory of the god Bhāillaº of Bhilasvāmin did not totally eclipse with the demolition or desecreation of his temple in 1233-34 A.D. But it was not destined to continne for a long time. According to Badāūni’s Muntakhab-ut-Tawārīkh,^[2] in 1292 A.D., during the reign of the Khilji Sultān Jalāluddīn Fīrūz of Delhi, his nephew ’Alāuddīn, governor of Karra, obtained permission ‘ to proceed to Bhīlsā and attacked that country and brought much booty thence to present to the Sultān, and the idol which was the object of worship of the Hindūs he caused to be cast down in front of the gate of Badāūn to be trampled upon by the people’. Thus ended theworship of the god at the city which received his name and is still continuing to enjoy it in its colloquial form.

A. Inscription of V. S. 935

In December 1952 and January 1953, I was travelling in certain areas of Madhya Bhārat and Rājasthān in search of inscriptions. In that connection I visited Gwalior during the last week of December 1952. There I had an opportunity not only of attending the Fifteenth Session of the Indian History Congress but also of inspecting a number of stone inscriptions exhibited in the local museum under the Archaeological Department of the old Gwalior State (now Madhya Bhārat). One of these records was a stone inscription collected from Mahalghāṭ at Bhīlsā. It has been noticed in the Annual Report of the State Archaeological Department for Saṁvat 1970 (Inscription No. 8) as well as in H. N. Dvivedi’s Gwalior Rājyake Abhilekh (p. 3, No. 10), published by the same Department. According to the account published in these words, the inscription is fragmentary and illegible and its purport not clear. On a careful examination of the record, however, I found that the major part of the inscription could be satisfactorily made out. It was also found that it is the earliest among the known inscriptions mentioning the temple of Bhāillasvāmin at Bhīlsā.

The inscription under discussion contains only twelve lines of writing and covers a space about 16″ in length and 13″ in height. The writing is considerably damaged in lines 10-12. A portion has broken away from the left hand side of the inscribed stone and this has caused the loss of one or two aksharas as the beginning of lines 3-9.

The characters of the record belong to the North Indian Alphabet of the ninth century, sometimes called early Nāgarī. Its language is corrupt Sanskrit. As to the orthography of the inscription, it may be said that it exhibits some errors of spelling. The record bears the date : [Vikrama] Saṁvat 935, Vaiśākha-sudi 3. This date falls in 878 A.D.

The inscription records the grant of an akshayanikā made in favour of the āyatana or temple of the illustrious Bhāillasvāmin. The expression akshayanikā is apparently a mistake for

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^[1] Elliot and Dowson, op. cit., Vol. II, p. 328 ; cf. Hodivala, Studies in Indo-Muslim History, p. 217 ; Raverty, Tatagāt-i-Nāsirī, trans., pp. 622-23.
^[2] Ranking’s trans., Vol. I, p. 96.