North Indian Inscriptions

INSCRIPTIONS OF THE PARAMARAS OF MALWA

Nos. 1-2 ; PLATES I AND II
TWO HARSŌLĀ COPPER-PLATE GRANTS OF SĪYAKA
[Vikrama] year 1005

..THE plates on which these grants are incised were noticed by D.B. Diskalkar in the Annual Report of the Watson Museum, Rajkot, for 1922-23, p. 13, and also in the Proceedings of the Madras Oriental Conference, pp. 303 ff. The same scholar also published their contents, with his own transcripts thereof, in a Gujarātī Journal called Purātattva, Vol. II, pp. 44 ff. Subsequently, the inscriptions were edited by him, with abridged translation and facsimiles, jointly with the late Rao Bahadur K. N. Dikshit, in the Epigraphia Indica, Vol. XIX (for 1927), pp. 236 ff. As the original plates are not accessible to me, the grants are edited here from inked estampages kindly provided by the Chief Epigraphist and also from the photographs accompanying the article in the Epi. Ind.

....They are two grants, each consisting of two plates which are engraved only on the inner side and which were, at the time when Dikshit wrote on them, in the possession of a Visnagarā Brāhmaṇa named Bhaṭṭa Magan Motīrām, a resident of the village Harsōlā in the Prāntija tālukā of the Ahmedabad District in Gujarāt. Unfortunately, no information is available as to where and under what circumstances the plates were discovered. The editors of the grants were informed by the late Rao Bahadur Keshavlal H. Dhruva, as we are also told, that the first two of them were found joined together by a ring and the remaining two were found loose. But from the presence of the Garuḍa symbol on only one of the sets, it was conjectured that all the four plates were originally joined together, all the more so when both the grants were issued by the same king on the same day to two Brāhmaṇas who were related to each other as father and son.[1] For the sake of convenience, I follow Dikshit and Diskalkar in calling the father’s grant as grant A and the son’s grant as B ; both are edited here as Nos. 1 and 2, respectively, but so far as the preliminary portion of this article is concerned, both the grants are treated separately, since each has its own peculiarities with reference to palaeography, orthography and some other aspects of them. With reference to their common features, it may, however, be stated here that their edges are raised into rims to protect the writing, which is rather bold and more carefully done in grant A. It is in a fair state of preservation.

GRANT A (No.1)

....This set consists of two rectangular plates of copper, each of which is inscribed on the inner side only, as stated above. When found they were held together by a ring passing through a hole, showing a diameter of about .5 cms. and cut in the centre of the lower side of the first and the upper side of the second, disturbing the writing in two lines at the edge. Nothing about the ring is now known. The inscribed portion on the first of the plates covers a space measuring about 21.5 cms. broad by 13 cms. high and contains 16 lines, whereas that on the second it is 21 cms. broad by 8.5 cms. high and contains only 11 lines (17 to 27), the last of which shows only one letter followed by a symbol somewhat resembling the Nāgarī akshara da (for chha, as we find at the end of some of the inscriptions). In the lower field of the left side and below the last line of the second plate is incised the representation of flying Garuḍa, the symbol of the Paramāra house of Mālava, holding a snake in his right arm and with the left hand raised above as if to
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[1] This view is plausible but not conclusive, since it is equally possible to hold that the figure could not be incised on the second plate on the son’s grant for want of space.

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