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The Indian Analyst
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South Indian Inscriptions |
EPIGRAPHIA INDICA kshā (line 5), yō (line 25), etc. The inscription contains the initial vowels ā (line 3), i (line 30) and u (line 20) and the figure for 3 (line 33). The language of the inscription is Sanskrit. It is written partly in verse and partly in prose. There are some verse describing the members of the Ādi-Bhañja family at the beginning of the charter. These are more or less the same as found in many other records of the family, all of which were discovered in the Mayurbhanj region of Orissa.[1] As usual there are some imprecatory and benedictory verses at the end of the record. From the view-point of orthography also the present inscription resembles those of the other members of the Ādi-Bhañja dynasty. There are many cases of errors of grammar and metre as well as wrong spelling due to carelessness on the part of the scribe and the engraver. The verse referring to the reigning monarch has been adopted from the records of the earlier members of the family by simply changing the king’s name ; but it has not been noticed that the change does not suit the metre at all. The charter is dated in year 3 apparently referring to the regnal reckoning of the reigning monarch. The letters indicating the month and day are doubtful. The date of the record does not therefore help us in determining the actual age of the charter. But there is reason to believe that the ruler who issued it flourished sometime in the eleventh century A. D. As will be seen below, the issuer of the present charter was a son of the Ādi-Bhañja king Raṇabhañja, two of whose records are known to be dated respectively in the year 288 and 293[2] of an unspecified era. There can be little doubt that this era is no other than the reckoning used by the imperial Bhauma-Kara dynasty of Orissa. We have recently shown that the Bhauma-Kara era started from 831 A. D.[3] Thus the dates of Raṇabhañja’s inscriptions would appear to correspond to 1119 and 1124 A. D. It is, however, difficult to believe that these Bhañjas could have continued their independent rule in the Mayurbhanj region for a long time after the expiration of Bhauma-Kara suzerainty in lower Orissa by the Sōmavaṁśīs of upper Orissa in the first half of the eleventh century[4] and the extermination of the Sōmavaṁśīs from the said region by the great Gaṅga monarch Anantavarman Chōḍagaṅga about the beginning of the next century.[5] Moreover, the practice of writing numbers by symbols instead of figures of the decimal system, which is exhibited by Raṇabhañja’s records, seems to have become obsolete in Orissan epigraphy before the middle of the eleventh century. It therefore seems that, as in some other early medieval Orissan records like the Santiragrama grant[6] of the Bhauma-Kara queen Daṇḍimahādēvī and the Talmul plate[7] of Dhruvānanda, the symbol locking like that for 200 in the inscriptions of Raṇabhañja actually stands for 100. The reading of the dates of Raṇabhañja’s records may thus be really the years 188 and 193 of the Bhauma-Kara era, corresponding respectively to 1019 and 1024 A. D. The present inscription may therefore be assigned to a date about the middle of the eleventh century A. D.
The charter begins with a verse in adoration to Bhava, i.e. Śiva, Verse 2 says how the Gaṇadaṇḍa,[8] called Vīrabhadra, came out by breaking the egg of a pea-hen in the great hermitage called Kōṭṭaśrama. He is said in the next half verse to have been a king reared by the sage Vasishṭha and an expert in killing his enemies. The following verse says that in his family, _________________________________________________
[1] N. N. Vasu, Archaeological Survey of Mayurbhanj, Vol. I., pp. 141 ff., 144 ff. ; H. P. Sastri, JBORS, Vol. IV,
pp. 175 ff. ; P. C. Ghosh, JASB, Vol. XL, Part I, pp. 168 ff. ; IHQ, Vol. XIII, pp. 427 ff., 429 ff. ; above, Vol. XXV,
pp. 155 ff., 159 ff., 162 ff., 173.
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