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The Indian Analyst
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South Indian Inscriptions |
INCRIPTIONS OF THE EARLY CHALUKYAS OF GUJARAT
No. 29 ; PLATE XXII (THESE copper-plates were found in the possession of a merchant at Surat, the chief town of the Surat District in the Bombay State. They were published together with the Navsāri plates of Pulakēśirāja1 by Pandit Bhagvanlal Indraji in the Verhandlungen des VII Internationalen Orientalisten-Congresses, Arische Section, pp. 211 ff. His article on them was accompanied by a lithograph and a translation. I edit the inscription here from excellent ink impressions kindly supplied by the Government Epigraphist for India through the good offices of the Curator of the Oriental Institute, Baroda, where The plates are now deposited. âThe plates are two in number and measure 10½” by 7½”. The outer sides are left blank; on the inner sides the lines run breadth-wise as on the Valabhī plates. Two rings, a plain one and one with a seal attached, held the plates together, passing through the holes in the bottom of the first and in the top of the second. The former has been lost, while the latter remains in its proper position. The seal has the shape of an inverted cone with a round top, 1½” in diameter…. It bears the inscription Śrī-Dharāśraya, the name of the donor’s father. Below this is the representation of a flower resembling a blown lotus’.2 To judge from the impressions the plates are in a state of excellent preservation throughout.
The characters are of the western variety of the southern alphabets. They closely resemble those of the Navsāri plates of the same donor.3 there are small knobs at the top of letters. The initial ē which is open on the left closely resembles l which has everywhere a short vertical and is distinguished from it only by the absence of a knob at the top. The forms of the rare initial ō in Osumbhalā, 1.21, and of the looped d in Śāņdilya, 1.19 are noteworthy. The sign of the jihvāmūlīya occurs in ll.10 and 26, and that of the upadhmānīya in 11.13, 14 and 29. Punctuation is marked by single or double dots, in ll.1, 23, 36 etc., by a small circle in 1.32 and by the vertical strokes in ll.1, 18 etc. The numerical symbols for 400, 40 and 3 occur in 1.36 and those for 10 and 5 in 1.37. The language is Sanskrit. Except for two verses in the beginning, one in praise of
the boar incarnation and the other glorifying the donor’s suzerain Vinayāditya, and four
benedictive and imprecatory ones at the end, the record is in prose throughout. It may
be noted that the formal part of the grant contains in ll.26-28 several expressions copied
verbatim or with slight changes from the earlier Sēndraka records,4 and in ll.28-29 some
more taken from the Kalachuri grants.5 The record is correctly written almost throughout,
solecisms being very few. As instances of the latter, we may notice that the gender
of puņyē in 1.25 does not agree with that of the noun tithau which it qualifies, and the
affix of the comparative is prefixed (and not suffixed) to the adjective subhage in 1.31.
As regards orthography, we may note that the class-nasal is almost always used in place
of the anusvāra; the visarga after vikrama in 1.2 is dropped in accordance with vārttika
on Pāņini, VIII. 3.36; the guttural nasal is incorrectly used for anusvāra in Narasinha, 1.2, 1 No. 30, below.
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