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EPIGRAPHIA INDICA
goldsmith named Harirām N. Sonī who takes interest in the antiquities of the area. A few years
later, the news of the discovery of the inscription reached the ears of Mr. M. C. Chaubey soon after
he had come to join the Government Intermediate College at Mandasōr as Lecturer in History.
Mr. Chaubey took photographs of the inscription and sent them for examination to a few students
of Indian history known to him. The inscription was next brought by Mr. Chaubey to the College
premises where a small museum was started under the guidance of Mr. N. S. Purandare, Principal of
the College. About the middle of 1954, one of Mr. Chaubey’s photographs of the inscription reached
the office of the Government Epigraphist for India through Dr. S. L. Katare, then Professor of the
Jabalpur Mahāvidyālaya. In January 1955 I visited Mandasōr and copied the inscription.
The inscribed space on the stone slab covers an area about 10 inches in bread and about 9
inches in height. The inscription is fragmentary. Some letters have broken away from both
the left and right sides while the concluding lines of the original record, probably containing a
date and the names of the scribe and engraver, are also lost. The extant portion of the inscription
contains only eleven lines of writing ; but just a few letters of the eleventh line are now visible.
Originally a line of the epigraph contained about twentyfour aksharas. Each akshara measures
about ½ inch or more in height. In spite of its fragmentary nature, the record, when studied along
with the Chhōṭī Sādrī inscription edited above, throws some light on a rather dark period of the
history of Daśapura which stood on the site of present Mandasōr.
The characters closely resemble those of the Chhōṭī Sādrī inscription (491 A. D.) and the
record has to be assigned to a date about the end of the fifth century A.D., not only on palaeographical considerations but also for the fact that both the epigraphs were incised during the
reign of the same ruler. The signs of medial u and ū (cf. satputra in line 4, Hariśūr=ēti in line 6,
anuttama in line 7, kūpāś=cha in line 8, etc.) and subscript ḍ in maṇḍapāś=cha (line 8) are interesting to note. The end of the second and fourth feet of a stanza is often indicated by a slightly
curved horizontal stroke. The ordinary double daṇḍa has, however, been placed at the end of
verses 1-2, while at the end of a half stanza, apparently treated by the author as a full verse, in
line 5, we have a daṇḍa with its upper part curved towards the left. The language of the inscription is Sanskrit. It is written in verse, the metre of the extant stanzas being Anushṭubh.
There is, however, not a single stanza which is fully preserved. The beauty of the composition of
this small fragmentary poem in the simplest of Sanskrit metres is marred by a number of orthographical and grammatical errors as well as by the weakness of the author’s style. Although
such defects are more marked in the Chhōṭī Sādrī inscription, which is a much longer record composed in several classical metres, it is possible to suspect that it was the same poet who was responsible for the composition of both the records. As regards orthographical and grammatical
errors in the present inscription, attention may be drawn to garutma-ratha for garutmad-ratha
(line 1),saṁkkhē for saṁkhyē (line 2), varddhaṇa for varddhana (twice in line 4), putraḥ for putrō
(line 4) and idam for ayam (line 9). Mistakes like datvā for dattvā (line 7) and satva for sattva
(line 10) are of course of common occurrence in early Indian epigraphs while tapa for tapas (line 7)
is not unknown to Sanskrit lexicons. The following stylistic defects in the author’s composition
may also be noticed in this connection. The use of the seventh case-ending (bhāvē saptamī) in
verse 2 in lines 2-3 suggests that the author is going to describe an event that happened during
the reign of a ruling king mentioned in it. The event in question, however, is referred to in a
stanza in lines 9-10 about the end of the epigraph and the intervening stanzas deal with facts which
relate to the ancestors of the person responsible for the said event and mostly happened before
the reign of the ruler referred to in verse 2. Then again, in line 5, a ruler is mentioned with the
third case-ending suggesting that the author was going to describe some of his activities. But this
expected description of his deeds is found only after two complete stanzas referring to facts that
relate to the maternal grandfather and mother of the said ruler. As will be seen below, the first
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