North Indian Inscriptions

INSCRIPTIONS OF THE KALACHURIS OF RATANPUR

No. 91 ; PLATE LXXIV AMODA PLATE (FIRST SET) OF PRITHVIDEVA II: (KALACHURI) YEAR 900

THIS set of two copper-plates was discovered together with three others^¹ in May 1924, while digging for the foundation of a temple at Amōdā, a village situated 40 miles south by east of Bilaspur, in the Jānjgir tahsil of the Bilaspur District in Madhya Pradesh. The inscription on them has been edited with lithographs, but without a translation, by Rai Bahadur Hiralal in the Indian Historical Quarterly, Vol, I, pp, 405 ff. It is edited here from the original plates which are deposited in the Central Museum, Nagpur.

The plates are inscribed on one side only. They measure from 11. 9” to 12. 1” broad from 7. 3” to 7. 7” high and. 15” thick. Their ends are slightly raised for the protection of the writing. The second plate is in a state of good preservation, but the surface of the first is damaged in several places by verdigris. As the initial portion of the record is repeated from earlier inscriptions of the family, the damaged aksharas can be easily supplied. At the top of each plate there is a hole, .6” in diameter, for the ring which held the plates together. This ring bears a circular seal, 7.9” in diameter, containing the figure of squatting Lakshimī with an elephant on either side, pouring water on her. head with his uplifted trunk, and the legend Rāja-śrīmat-Pṛithvīdēvaḥ in two lines below. The weight of the two plates is 267½ tolas and that of the ring and the seal is 15 tolas.

The characters are Nāgarī. The letters are deeply incised, but not neatly formed. Their average size is .3” , The form of the initial i appears 'like an arrow-head with a parallel stroke below'; see iti in 11. 10 and 32; the left portion of kh shows a curve at the top like that of s; see, e.g., sākhā, 1 . 21 ; the upperloop of th is closed in some places and open in others; see Pṛithvīdēva, 1.19 and kari-yūtha-, 1.20; b is denoted by its proper sign only in the forms babhūvur= and babhūva, 11. 6 and 14; in other cases it is not distinguished from v; the sign of the avagraha occurs in 11. 3,8, 11, 20 and 32. The language is Sanskrit. Except for oṁ namō Vrahmaṇē in the first line and the name of the engraver in the last, the whole inscription is in verse. There are, in all, twenty-one verses, all of which are numbered.^² The record contains several mistakes owing to the carelessness of the writer or the engraver; see, e,g., apṭādaś- for ashṭādaś-, 1.6, -ānan-ābhōruḍa- for ānan-āmbhōruha-, 1. 9., etc. The final consonant is not so marked in many places. As regards orthography, the consonant following r is often reduplicated; see, e.g., Kārttavīryaḥ , 1. 3, -karmmāṇau, 1. 29; the dental s is used for the palatal ś in -sasvat=, 1. 5, =saurya-, 1. 7, etc., and the dental n for the lingual ṇ in pratigrinhāti, 1.28.

The inscription is one of Pṛithvīdēva II of the Kalachuri Dynasty of Ratanpur. His genealogy down to his father Ratnadēva II is given here exactly as in the latter's Sarkhō plates. In fact the text of the present inscription down to verse 10 is , with the omission of one verse, identical with that of the Sarkhō plates. Verse 11, descriptive of Pṛithvīdēva II, appears here for the first time, but the description in it is quite conventional.

The object of the inscription is to record the grant, by Pṛithvīdēva II, of the village Avalā situated in the Madhya-maṇḍala on the occasion of a lunar eclipse
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¹ Viz. Nos. 76 94 and 99. No. 94 is another grant of Pṛithvīdēva II himself and is date about five years later than the present one.
² The last verse is marked 20 by mistake.