South Indian Inscriptions

EPIGRAPHIA INDICA

Śiva or Vishṇu). The language of the passage recording the grant, which follows in lines 30 ff., is defective ; but it apparently means to say that the amount of three drammas received by the government as śiriḍikā (the same as siriḍirkā of the previous record, meaning a sort of tax or cess) on account of the village of Kēṇasā-grāma in the possession of the Kautuka-maṭhikā was granted in favour of the householders and scholars attached to the maṭhikā in the form of a permanent endowment for the purpose of feeding 25 Brāhmaṇas probably per day. It will be seen that Kautuka’s maṭhikā at Saṁyāna is mentioned in all the five grants discovered at Chinchani, including the three edited here, although, in the second of the three epigraphs now under study, the name Kautuka is spelt as Kavatika. The endowment has been called a bhōjan-ākshayaṇī or bhōjanākshayanī, the word akshayaṇī or akshayanī being a corruption of Sanskrit akshaya-nīvī meaning ‘a permanent endowment’. The expression thus means a permanent endowment created for the purpose of providing food free of cost. In line 42, the endowment is referred to merely as bhōjana and in line 46 as grāsa.

The following section in lines 33-47 in prose and verse contains some more of the benedictory and imprecatory stanzas. Lines 47-48 contain the statement that the donor’s decree was contained in the text of the document as written by one of his officers styled Dhruva (i. e. the collector of the royal share of the produce from the farmers). This is followed in lines 48-49 by the sentence : ‘Confirmed by me, the Maṇḍalēśvara, the illustrious Vijja-rāṇaka’, in the well-known style of putting the signature of the donor on a document later engraved on copper plates. The next sentence says that Dhruva Mammalaiya wrote the document at the request of both the parties (i.e. the donor and the donees) under orders of Maṇḍalēśvara Vīja-rāṇaka. It is further stated in line 50 that the text of the charter was to be regarded as authoritative. The record ends with a maṅgala of the usual type.

Of the geographical names mentioned in the charter, the most interesting is the Saṁyāna-pattana 700 forming a maṇḍala consisting of 4000 draṅgas. It was apparently the district round the town of Saṁyāna (Sanjan). But it is difficult to explain the passage used in the inscription to indicate the territorial unit. We know that expressions like ‘Saṁyāna-pattana 700’ normally meant ‘the Saṁyāna-pattana division consisting of 700 villages or hamlets’ although the number may have been conventional or exaggerate.^[1] But the word draṅga generally means ‘a town’ and it is impossible to believe that a terri]torial division consisting only of 700 villages or hamlets contained as may as 4000 towns. It therefore seems that draṅga in the inscription is a mistake for dramma. The intended meaning of the passage in question may therefore be that the annual revenue income of the territory under the rule of the Mōḍha chief of the Saṁyāna district consisting of 700 villages or hamlets was 4000 drammas possibly meaning coins of silver. A locality called Ākāśikā is stated to have stood on the borders of the said district. The donor seems to have made a permanent endowment out of the śiriḍikā tax or cess amounting to 3 drammas, probably payable annually or periodically to the government by the Kautuka-maṭhikā at Saṁyāna on account of a village called Reṇasā-grāma in its possession. I am not sure about the location of this village.

TEXT^[2]

Metres : verses 1, 3-9, 12-16 Anushṭubh ; verse 2 Vaṁśastha ; verse 10 Pushpitāgrā, verse 11 Śālinī.]

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^[1] See JBRS, Vol. XL, part i, pp. 9 ff.
^[2] From impressions.