North Indian Inscriptions

INSCRIPTIONS OF THE SILAHARAS OF NORTH KONKAN

The grant was edited by M.G. Dikshit and myself in the Epigraphia Indica, Vol. XXVI, pp. 282 f. from the original plates preserved in the Prince of Wales Museum. They are edited here from the facsimiles accompanying that edition.

..The grant is engraved on three copper-plates, of which the first and the third bear writing on one side only, and the second, on both the sides. The plates measure about 18. 70 cm. broad and 15. 24 cm. high. Their total weight is 2041.17 grm. At the centre of the top of each plate there is a hole, 1.27 cm. diameter for the ring which originally held all the plates together, but no ring or seal has yet been found. The inscription contains 76 lines of writing, of which twenty are written on the inner side of the first plate, twenty-one and twenty on the first and second side respectively of the second plate, and the remaining fifteen on the inner side of the third plate. The writing is throughout in an excellent state of preservation.

.. The characters are of the Nāgarī alphabet resembling those of the Sinda prince Ādityavarman’s grant dated Śaka 887[1]. Like the latter record, the present grant is written in a cursive hand. The technical execution is very bad as the record has throughout been written and engraved in the most negligent manner. Several letters, being very crudely and imperfectly formed, are changed quite out of recognition. There are, besides, mistakes of orthography, omissions of letters and words, and in two places (viz. in lines 20 and 21) of nearly half a verse. This makes the task of decipherment extremely difficult.

.. The language is Sanskrit, and the record is written partly in verse and partly in prose. The initial genealogical portion in lines 1-39 is in verse. Then follows the formal portion in prose in lines 39-61. The usual benedictory and imprecatory verses occur in lines 62-74. The rceord finally closes with a sentence in prose, mentioning the royal sanction of the grant. The draft of the genealogical portion used here is altogether different from that of the later grants of the Śilāhāras. No draft of that portion was evidently stereotyped at the time of the present record. It may, however, be noted that the present grant has one hemistich and one complete verse in common with the Khārepāṭan plates (No. 41), dated Śaka 930, of the Śilāhāra Raṭṭarāja, who ruled over South Koṅkaṇ.[2] As regards orthography, we may notice that the vowel ṛi is used for ri in tṛilokī, line 6, the consonant preceding or following r is doubled as in puttro-line 8 and varddhatām, line 1, v is throughout used for b and the final n is in some places wrongly changed to anusvāra as in yāṁ, line 17.

.. The inscription refers itself to the reign of the Śīlāra (i.e. Śilāhāra) Mahāsāmanta ChhaDvaidēva[3] of North Koṅkaṇ. The object of it is to record that Chhadvaidēva executed the grant which had been made by Vajjaḍadēva, the son of Gōggi, who, as shown below, was Chhadvaidēva’s elder brother and predecessor on the throne.[4] It seems that the grant promised by Vajjaḍa I had not been reduced to writing during his life-time. Lines 75-76 tell us that on coming to know of it, Chhadvaidēva granted the present charter recording the religious gift without any alteration. The grant was of three fields situated in the eastern part of the village Sālaṇaka in the vishaya of Pāṇāḍa. It was bounded on the east by the boundary of Mañchaka-
__________________

[1] Ep. Ind., Vol. XXV, pp. 164 f.
[2] The first hemistich of v. 7 of the present grant appears as the first half of verse 3 in the Khārēpāṭaṇ plates, while verse 11, which describes Kṛishṇa III, occurs in the same context as verse 6 in the latter grant.
[3] The name of this prince occurs four times, viz., in verses 16 and 25 in the metrical portion, and in lines 42 and 75 in the prose portion. In the first two cases the reading is not quite certain owing to the extremely cursive nature of the letters, but in the last two cases the reading is undoubted. The form must have been Chhadaya in v. 25 and Chhadvai in all other cases.
[4] Owing to the carelessness of the drafter of the record, the text in line 49 seems to convey that Chhadvaidēva himself made the present grant. Lines 74 and 75, however, make it clear that it had already been made by Vajjaḍa (I), and that Chhadvaidēva only caused it to be recorded on the copper-plates. For a similar case, see No. 23.