South Indian Inscriptions

INCRIPTIONS OF THE SENDRAKAS

KASARE PLATES OF ALLASAKTI : YEAR 404

portion and one more added at the end to convey benediction and imprecation, the record is in prose throughout. It is written in an ornate style,¹ but contains two grammatical blunders² in the second verse. As regards orthography, we may notice that the medial ŗi is in many places written as ri; see –nighrishţa , 1.4, drishţvā, 1.5 etc.; v and b are generally expressed by separate signs, but in prabhabati 1.6, and bhagabatō, 1.27, v is indicated by the sign for b ; the consonant following r has been correctly reduplicated in several places, but in varshsha-, 1.27 it violates Pāņini’s rule, VIII, 4, 49.

The plates were issued by Allaśakti of the family of the Sēndrakas, who had attained the pañchamahāśabda and was a devout worshipper of Mahēśvara. The birudas Pŗithivīvallabha and Śrī-Nikumbha³ are mentioned in connection with his name. The charter in its revised form purports to record the grant of fifty nivartanas of land to the south of the river Pa(?)rņandha⁴ in the village Pippalakhēţa, in honour of the deity Alanghyēśvara. The donee was the Brāhmaņa Bālapravasita of the Kŗishņātrēya gōtra, who was a student of the Mādhyandina śākhā of the Vājasanēya or White Yajurvēda. The grant was written by Dēvadinna by the order of the Mahābalādhikŗita, the illustrious Vāsava.⁵ It was made on the occasion of the solar eclipse on the new moon day of Āshādha in the year 404, expressed in numerical symbols⁶ only, of an unspecified era.

In the eulogistic portion we are told that Allaśakti was the son of Ādityarāja, who was himself the son of the illustrious Nikumbha. The description of these princes is quite conventional and mentions no historical event. Another grant of the Sēndrakas found at Mundkhēdē near Chalisgaon in West Khandesh has been published by the late Mr. G.K. Chandorkar.⁷ It gives the following genealogy—

¹ Notice, for instance, the puns in v. 2, which make the comparison of Ādityarāja with the sun possible and the description of Allaśakti in 11. 15-17 in which the names of all the Pāņdavas are cleverly interwoven.
² Viz., the ungrammatical form chakshū-bhūtah, 1. 9 and the wrong sandhi –tsutō =dityarājah, 1. 10.
³ That Nikumbha is a biruda is shown by the fact that the royal name occurs without it in the legend on the seal, as well as in 1. 17.
⁴ The first akshara of this name is uncertain.
⁵ The text reads Śrī-Vāsavasava-samādēśāt but the aksharas sava seem to have been repeated by mistake.
⁶ Of the symbols, the first denoting hundreds is clearly a sign for 400 and the second, except for the curve at the top, is the usual sign for 4. It may be noted that a similar curve is attached to the top of the symbol denoting 4 in the date of the Surat plates of Śryāśraya-Śilāditya, No. 19, Pl. XXII. The symbol would have to be taken as denoting 40 if the following symbol denotes a unit number like 7, but in that case its date (K. 447 or 696 A.C.) would be later than the date Śaka 602 or 680 A. C. which we have for Allaśakti’s son Jayaśakti in his Mundkhēdē plates. I, therefore, prefer to take the last sign to denote de, corresponding to di (dina) which occurs before the symbol of the tithi in early Brāhmī records. It is noteworthy that the scribe of the present grant wrote also the Bagumrā plates of the same king and the Mahābalādhikŗita was also the same in both, (see p. 121, n. 41, below). The names of both are mentioned in another grant of Allaśakti (see N. I. A., Vol. I, p. 747.) The date of the present grant must, therefore, be within a few years on either side of the date K. 406 of the Bagumrā plates.
⁷ This grant has been published twice, but without a facsimile, first in the Marāţhī monthly Prabhāta, Vol. I (pub. in 1908), and again in the Annual Report of the Bhārata Itibāsa Samshōdhaka Maņdala for Śaka 1834. The plates are not forthcoming now.