...Till the time when Bühler wrote, the stone bearing the inscription was lying in the courtyard of the Śiva temple known as of Udayēśvara, at Udaipur [4] , a big village in the Bāsōdā pargānā of the Vidishā District of Madhya Pradesh ; and it continued to be there probably up to 1917 A.C. when it was removed to the Archaeological Museum at Gwālior, where it is now exhibited. [5] At Udaipur it was probably laid in a part of the temple.

...The slab on which the record is incised is 71.12 cms. broad by 63.58 cms. high and has a plain border c. 6 cms. broad on all the four sides. The inscription which is in a sunken panel consists of 24 lines of writing, covering a space 63 cms. broad by 61.5 cms. high. The slab is entire and the last of the lines also extends over the whole breadth of the inscribed surface ; but the inscription is not complete, which evidently indicates that the remaining portion was engraved on a second slab. [6] The letters are beautifully formed and carefully engraved, but some of them have been abraded or damaged here and there due to the peeling off of the surface of the stone. The average height of the letters ranges between 1.5 and 2 cms.

...The script is Nāgarī of the eleventh century. The lowest extremity of verticals of the letters shows a sharp or angular bend to the right ; even the vowel a and the avagraha sign have a serif attached to their lowest end. Another peculiarity to be noticed throughout is that a downward stroke is attached to the beginning of the top-strokes of most of the letters, as in nādēna,1.2 Some of the letters are ornamentally formed, e.g., v which has a sort of horn attached to its vertical, and vvi also ; all these examples are to be noted in asty=urvī- in 1.5.

...Studying the palaeography of the aksharas, we find that the initial i is indicated by two loops surmounted by the third and all joined by a curve so as to appear as the precursor of the modern
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[1] The danḍas in the line are superfluous.
[2] This expression appears also in some other grants and is current throughout Mālwā even to this day. It may be interpreted as dharmasya ādāyaḥ =ādānam, grahaṇam.
[3] The rest of the inscription is lost, as already stated above.
[4] The place is about 6 kms. south-east of Barēṭh, a station between Vidishā and Bīnā on the Central Railway, The antiquities of this place are described by Cunningham in his A.S.I., A.R., Vol. VII, p. 81 and ibid., Vol. X, p. 65. Also see P.R.A.S., W.C., for 1913-14, p. 64 ; A.S.I., A.R., for 1923-24,p. 131 ; and Imp. Gaz., Vol. XXIV, p. 110.
[5] A.R.A.D.G.S., for V.S. 1974, which was not printed. The reference here is form H. N. Dvivedi’s Gwālior Rājya-kē Abhilēkha, (pp. 88-89, No. 650), which is a departmental publication.
[6] This was the case when Bühler wrote. But the second slab too was found later on. See Pt. B, below.

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