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The Indian Analyst
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North Indian Inscriptions |
INSCRIPTIONS OF THE KALACHURIS OF RATANPUR
No. 88 ; PLATE LXXI THIS inscription is incised on a stone slab let into the left wall of the maṇḍapa of the temple of Rājīvalōchana¹ at Rājim, a village 29 miles south-east of Raipur in the Mahāsamund tahsil of the Raipur District. Rājim stands on the right bank of the Mahānadī at the confluence of the Pairī with that river and is a well known place of pilgrimage in Chhattisgarh. The present record was first brought to notice in 1825 when Sir Richard Jenkins presented to the Asiatic Society of Bengal a copy of it, together with a translation prepared with the assistance of the Pandits, from which Prof. H.H. Wilson published a Dēvanāgarī transcript and a kind of translation, in the Asiatic Researches, Vol. XV, page 512 ff.² It was subsequently referred to by Sir A. Cunningham in this Archæological Survey of India Reports, Vol. VII, p. 152 and Vol. XVII, p. 18. It was finally edited, without any translation or lithograph, by Dr. Kielhorn in the Indian Antiquary, Vol. XVII, pp.135 ff. I edit it here from the original stone which I examined in situ and from the estampages of it taken under my direction. The record consists of 19 lines. It is inscribed on a countersunk surface measuring 2 ' 3½ '' broad by I' I'' high. It is in a state of good preservation, but many of its letters are so choked up with oily dust that they do not show clearly in the lithograph. The record can, however, be read clearly on the original stone. The letters are not wellformed. Their size varies from .4” to. 5”. The characters are Nāgarī. Attention may be drawn to the form of ṅ which appears without a dot ( e.g., in prāṅ-mukhā-,1.8), that of th, the upper loop of which is open (see yathā, 1.8) and of dh the left limb of which is still undeveloped, (see -dharmma-,1.6). The prishṭhamātrās have been used to denote the medial diphthongs. The language is Sanskrit. Except for the opening obeisance to Nārāyaṇa, the description of Sāhilla, an ancestor of the donor, in 11. 1-2, that of a person named Muktātman, the owner of the temple, in 1.15 and the particulars about the composer, the scribe and the date in 11. 17-19, the record is metrically composed. There are, in all, twenty-six verses, all of which are numbered. The praśasti, as the inscription is called in 1. 18, was composed by the Ṭhakkura Jasānanda, the son of the Ṭhakkura Jasōdhara in the Ayōdhyāpurīya family and was written as well as engraved by the artisan Ratnapāla.
The composer of this praśasti had a very poor knowledge of Sanskrit; for the record
abounds in mistakes of orthography, genders, sandhis, declensional and conjugational
forms, compounds, syntax, nominal and verbal derivatives etc. As regards orthography, we may notice that the dental n is used for the guttural ṅ in -ālankṛita-, 1. I,
for the palatal ñ in satyan=cha, 1. 10, and for anusvāra in-hansa-, 1.2, ēkavinsa-, 11. 4-5
and -vansē, 1. 13; v is used for b throughout except in –mahāsabd-, 1. I; the dental s
has wrongly taken the place of the palatal ś in – dēsa-, -mahāsabda, -kalasa-, saṁkāsa,
all in 1. 1, sāntā, 1.6, sara-saṁghātaiḥ, 1.7; jya is employed for dya in bhayāj=yasya, 1. 7,
prāṅ-mukhāj=yasya 1.8; kshya for khya in vikshyātā 1. 5 and gh for h in siṁghēn= ēva,
1.8. As instances of wrong sandhis we may notice the elision of the visarga in trāsitā
sūrāḥ-, 1. 2, pattanai saha, 1. 4 etc., the change of aḥ to o in Vāsudēvō tath= āpi, 1.3, anujō 1 Dr.Kielhorn's statement that it is on a wall of the temple of Rāmachandra is somewhat misleading;
for this temple is now different from that of Rājīvalōchana. It must, however, be added that the present
inscription speaks in 1. 14 of a temple of Rāma. Rāma was, therefore, the name of the deity in the time
of Jagapāla. An older record in the same temple speaks of it as dedicated to Vishṇu. See below, p. 451, n. 1.
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