North Indian Inscriptions

INSCRIPTIONS OF THE PARAMARAS OF CHANDRAVATI

No. 74 ; PLATE LXXV
BUTRĪ STONE INSCRIPTION OF DHĀRĀVARSHA
[Vikrama] Year 1271

... THE stone on which this inscription is engraved was found by Pandit G. S. Ojha, in the early years of the of the present century, at Butrī, a village in the Piṇḍwāḍā (now Sirōhī Road) tehsīl of the Sirōhī District in South-West Rājasthān. Ojha noticed the inscription in his Annual Report of the Rājputānā Museum, Ajmer, for 1910-11. on page 2; and the record was subsequently transcribed by R. R. Halder, in the Indian Antiquary, Volume LVI, p. 51, with a facsimile plate, It is edited here from the same facsimile and an impression kindly supplied to me, at my request, by Shri. Om Prakash Sharma, the Curator of the Museum, where the stone is now deposited. Later on, I have also compared my reading of the text from a photograph kindly supplied by the chief Epigraphist.

...The inscription is in a sunken panel below the figure of a cow with calf and consists of four lines which are engraved on a marble slab, measuring 48.9 cms. high by 26.67 cms. broad. [1] The alphabet is Nāgarī and the language is Sanskrit. The record is entirely in prose, With reference to orthography it may be observed that that dental sibilant is put for the palatal in -maṇḍalēsvara, 1. 2, and vice versa is the case in praśāda-, 1. 4.

... The object of the inscription is to record the grant of one halavāha of land (the area that can be tilled with one plough in a day ) in the village of Śāvaḍa Vṛiddha (now known as Baḍī Ānval), to a merchant named Āmpa, by the Mahāmaṇḍalēśvara Dhārāvarshadēva, who is evidently, from the find-spot and the locality of the inscription, the homonymous king who was the son of Yaśōdhavala and holding his sway over the region of Chandrāvatī. The date of the inscription, as recorded in words and figures in 1. 1, is Monday, the fourth day of Āsōja śu di of the (Vikrama) Saṁvat 1271, which regularly corresponds to the 8th of September, 1214 A.C. [2]

... Dhārāvarsha, as we have seen so often, was a feudatory of the Chaulukya throne of Gujarāt, and his overlord in the year of the present record was Bhīma II (1179-1239 A.C.). It is a royal document; but it states nothing that is historically important.

... The only place-name mentioned in the inscription is Sāvaḍa Vṛiddha, 1. 3, which, as already seen, is the modern village of Baḍī Ānval.

TEXT [3]

________________________

[1] As mentioned by Ojha in op. cit., Appx, A. p. 5, No. 8.
[2] D. R. Bhandarkar’s List of Inscrs, of N. India, No. 463.
[3] From facsimile between pp. 50-51 of Ind. Ant., Vol. LVI.
[4] This is probably a contraction of

[5] The sign of anusvāra on the akshara in the brackets has not fully come out and it also appears as Śrī. But the name of the donee in that case would be totally missing. My reading of this letter is absolutely certain, in view of the same form that it shows twice in 1. 1. above.

..........................................CORPUS INSCRIPTIONUM INDICARUM
VOL.VII .................................................................................................PLATE LXXXIV
..............JHALODI STONE INSCRIPTION OF THE TIME OF DHARAVARSHA: (VIKRAMA) YEAR 1255

Home Page