South Indian Inscriptions

INSCRIPTIONS OF THE MAHARAJAS OF VALKA

word varsha in stead of the usual samvat. The plate is signed by the Mahārāja, the illustrious Svāmidāsa.

Svāmidāsa who issued the present plate was only a feudatory chief; for he describes himself as parama-bhattāraka-pād-ānudhyāta ‘meditating on the feet of the Great Lord’, though he does not name his suzerain. The latter probably belonged to the Imperial family which started the era in which the date of the present inscription is recorded. The date does not admit of verification in the absence of such details as a week-day or a nakshatra. We must therefore identify the era to which it refers, on other evidence. Unfortunately, the provenance of the plate has not been recorded, but there is one circumstance which affords a clue. The present grant bears close resemblance to the Śirpur grant¹ of Rudradāsa, dated in the year 107, in several respects, viz., (i) the names of the princes in both the cases end in dāsa; (ii) both the princes bear the title Mahārāja and acknowledge their feudatory status in the same words; (iii) the characters and phraseology of the two grants are strikingly similar; (iv) the date is similarly worded and the year is introduced with the word varsha in both the grants. These similarities² leave no doubt that the two grants belong to the same royal family and came originally from the same part of the country. As the grant of Rudradāsa is known to have been found at Śirpur in the Khandesh District, that of Svāmidāsa also must, in all probability, have originally belonged to the same district of Northern Maharashtra. Pandit Islampurkar, who was engaged in collecting manuscripts and ancient historical records in different parts of the country, seems to have obtained the plate somewhere in Khandesh and taken it to Indore.

Dr. Majumdar referred the date of the present plate to the Gupta era on the ground that its characters resemble those of the Sāñchī inscription of Chandragupta II. This view cannot now be upheld; for we have no evidence of the spread of the Gupta era to Northern Maharashtra where, as we have seen, the plate was probably found.³ The use of the word varsha in recording the year of the grant may perhaps be taken to point to the Śaka era⁴, but that era is out of the question here, as the characters of the present grant are far more developed than those current in the second century A.C. The only other era to which the date can be referred is the so-called Kalachuri era founded in 249 A. C. by the Ābhīra king Īśvarasēna. Accordingly, the date would correspond, for the expired year 67, to the 2nd May 317 A. C.⁵ It does not admit of verification.
As for the localities mentioned in the present grant, Valkha, which was probably the
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¹No. 4, below.
²The place of issue is not named in the extant portion of the Śirpur grant, but it must have been mentioned in the beginning of the first line where two or three letters have been lost owing to the breaking off of a piece of the plate on the left. The sign-manual of Mahārāja Rudradāsa, which must have been incised in the margin on the left, is also lost.
³In fact there is no evidence of the spread of the Gupta era south of the Narmadā except the solitary grant of Bhīmasēna II (Ep. Ind., Vol. IX, pp. 342 ff. and Vol. XXVI, pp. 227 ff.) That grant, however, belongs to Kōsalā or modern Chhattisgarh, the ruler of which had submitted to Samudragupta. Khandesh, on the other hand, was never under the direct or indirect rule of the Guptas. The old identification of Ērandapallī mentioned in the Allahabad pillar inscription of Samudragupta with Ērandōl in Khandesh, proposed by Fleet, is now held to be untenable. See Dubreuil, Ancient History of the Deccan, pp. 59 f.
⁴Dr. Kielhorn has shown that the word varsha is characteristic of the Śaka era. See Ind. Ant., Vol. XXVI, p. 150. The use of that word in the present grant seems to be in imitation of the older grants dated in the Śaka era which was previously current in Maharastra.
⁵In the case of early records of the Kalachuri era (Nos. 1—34), the dates are calculated according to the epoch of 249-50 A. C. for an expired year.