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The Indian Analyst
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North Indian Inscriptions |
SUPPLEMENTARY INSCRIPTIONS
No.4 THIS inscription was first brought to notice in 1839 in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. VIII, pp. 481 ff., where the Editors published a transcript and a sort of translation together with introductory remarks, a facsimile of the seal and specimens of the letters. The inscription was next published, without any lithograph or translation, by Dr. F.E. Hall in 1862 in the same journal, Vol. XXXI, pp. 111 ff. The plates, which were made over to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, have since been lost. As even an impression of them is now not forthcoming, I have copied here Dr. Hall’s Transcript1 and added to it my notes and translation. The Copper-plates, two in number, were dug up at Kumbhī on the right bank of the Herun river, thirty-five miles north-east of Jabalpur, the chief town of the Jabalpur District in Madhya Pradesh. When discovered, the plates were held together by a ring which had the customary Kalachuri seal of Gaja-Lakshmī with the legend Śrīmad-Vijayasiṁhadēvaḥ. The inscription seems to have been in a state of good preservation as Dr. Hall found only about ten aksharas illegible. The size of the plates and of the letters incised on them, and also their weight have not been recorded. Judging from the specimens of the letters published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. VIII, the Characters belonged to the N¬āgarī alphabet. The language is Sanskrit. Except for the opening obeisance to Śiva, the formal portion of the grant and the particulars about the writer and the engraver at the end, the record is in verse throughout. There are forty-four verses in all, of which twenty-six occur in the introductory portion. The draft uses here is the same as that in the Jabalpur plates of Jayasiṁha2 but in the description of the Kalachuri kings down to Jayasiṁha, the present inscription has seven verses³ more than the latter record. Of these seven verses, again, four⁴ occur in the Khairhā and Jabalpur plates⁵ of Yaśaḥkarṇa, but three of them are employed there to describe Yaśaḥkarṇa, not Narasiṁha as in the present grant. As they contain merely conventional praise, they do not affect our historical information. The remaining three verses, viz., 14, 16 and 24, which eulogize Yaśaḥkarṇa, Gayākarṇa and Jayasiṁha respectively, and two more, viz. verses 25 and 26, which describe Vijayasiṁha and Gōsaladēvī, are not known to occur anywhere else. In respect of orthography, it is not possible now to say anything definitely as Dr. Hall has admittedly made several changes in his transcript before publication.
The inscription is one of the king Vijayasiṁha of the Later Kalachuri Dynasty
of Tripurī. Down to his father Jayasiṁha, his genealogy is given in the same words as
in the aforementioned Jabalpur plates. There is only one verse here about Vijayasiṁha and that too contains conventional praise. The object of the inscription is to record
the grant, by Gōsaladēvī, the mother of Vijayasiṁha, of the village Chōralāyī, in
the Sambalā pattalā. The grant was made by the dowager queen after bathing in the Narmadā at Tripurī on the occasion of a yug¬ādi6 and with the permission of her son, 1 The transcript is not made line by line and does not represent the original accurately, as Hall
made several changes in it before publication. As he admits in one place, ‘confusion of sibilants has, in
several instances unspecified, been redressed in the transcript now printed.’ J. A. S. B., Vol. XXXI,
p. 122, n.4.
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