South Indian Inscriptions

INSCRIPTIONS OF THE EARLY GURJARAS

No. 21; PLATE XIV
NAVSARI PLATES OF JAYABHATA III : (KALACHURI) YEAR 456

THESE plates were found during excavation of some foundations at Navsāri, the chief town of the Navsāri Prānt of the Surat District, Bombay State. They were brought to notice by Mr. Shariarji Dadabhai Bharuch of Navsāri, who sent them to Pandit Bhagvanlal Indraji. The latter edited them with photozincographed plates and a translation in the Indian Antiquary, Vol. XIII, pp. 70 ff. They are edited here from the same facsimiles.

They are two copper-plates each measuring 12″ by 9″. Their edges are fashioned thicker so as to serve as rims for the protection of the writing. A small piece at the top of the proper right-hand side and a large triangular piece with its sides measuring about 4″, 3″ and 4¾″ at the bottom of the same side of the second plate have been broken away and lost. This has resulted in the loss of one akshara in 1.23 and from one to six aksharas in 11.36-43. All the missing letters except those in 1.42 can, however, be conjecturally supplied. The plates are otherwise in a state of good preservation. They have two round holes about ½″ in diameter for the rings which must have originally held them together, but the rings and the seal, which must have been on one of them are lost. The record consists of forty-four lines, twenty-two being inscribed on each plate. The average size of letters is .15''.

The characters belong to the western variety of the southern alphabets and resemble those of the grants of Dadda II. As regards individual letters, attention may be drawn to the two forms of d as in the Kairā plates of K. 3801 ─one with a loop and the other with a tail, see tadāka-, 11. 24 and 28, and to the triangular th in pathak-, 1.22. Dh appears round in –ādhirōhana, 1. 10 and elongated elsewhere as in dhārā1.6; b is square in bahubhir-, 1.37, round in bandhu, 1. 15, bal-ādhikrita-, 1.42 and almost triangular like v, in bali-, 1.21; ś shows, instead of the usual horizontal bar, a notch in its right limb, see mahā-śabda and kuśalī, both in 1.17. A final consonant is indicated by a horizontal line at the top, see vasēt 1.36, or by curve as in nibaddham 1.43. Punctuation is expressed by single and double dots as well as by single and double vertical strokes. The numerical symbols for 400, 50 and 6 occur in 1. 42. Others for 10 and 5, which must have occurred at the beginning of 1.43, have been lost. The sign-manual at the end is in the northern current-hand characters. Unlike the sign-manual of Dadda II, it shows the bipartite Nāgari form of y.

The language is high-flown Sanskrit, containing long compounds and puns and other alankāras. The eulogistic portion is composed on the model of that of the earlier grants of Dadda II (see e.g., the Kairā plates). Except for six benedictive and imprecatory verses at the end, the record is in prose throughout. The Prakrit word satka occurs thrice in the formal part defining the boundaries of the donated field. As regards orthographical peculiarities, we may notice the use of the guttural nasal instead of anusvāra as in vanśa and nistrinśa, both in 1.6 and the doubling of a consonant after r as in vinirggata and chāturvvidya, both in 1.19, pūrvvōttara, 1.22 etc. The marks of punctuation appear redundant in many cases in the prose portion of the text.

The plates were issued by the illustrious Jayabhata, the devout worshipper of Mahēśvara, from his camp at Kāyāvatāra. He was born in a family descended from the Mahārāja Karna and had attained the pañchamahāśabda. The object of the inscription
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¹ See above No. 16.