South Indian Inscriptions

INSCRIPTIONS OF THE MAIN BRANCH

No. 12 ; PLATE XII
WAḌGAON PLATES OF PRAVARASENA II

...THESE plates were handed over to Dr. S. S. Patwardhan, Curator of the Central Museum, Nagpur, by one Bhagwan Shiva Ganar of Yēnur, a village in the Hiṅgaṇghāṭ tahsil of the Wardhā District, in Vidarbha. They were in the possession of his grandfather at Waḍgaon in the Warōrā tahsil of the Chāndā District. They were published by me with facsimiles in the Epigraphia Indica, Vol. XXVII, pp. 74 f. They are edited here from the same facsimiles. The plates are now deposited in the Prince of Wales Museum, Bombay.

...The copper-plates are four in number, of which the first and the last are inscribed on the inner side only, and the other two on both the sides. They measure 6.5” long and 3.5” broad, and weigh 97 tolas. They were held together by a ring, about 3 tōlās in weight, passing through a roundish hole, 1.3” from the middle of the left side of each plate. It must have originally carried the usual Vākāṭaka seal sliding on it, but it is not forthcoming now. There are forty-two lines of writing in all, which are evenly distributed on the six inscribed faces of the four plates. The writing is in a good state of preservation throughout. In a few cases the engraver has corrected his mistakes of omission and commission ; see aṁsa-bhāra-, line 4, saty-ārjjava, line 9 etc. ; but there are many more which are left uncorrected. In the right-hand lower corner of the first side of the second plate, he has incised the syllables Mārade (dā) sē, which were inadvertently omitted in line 42¹. In line 21 several letters were beaten in and in their place the expression vishuva-vāchanaka- was incised. This correction or tampering, whatever it might be, was apparently done in the Vākāṭaka age; for the substituted aksharas are of the same type as the rest of the record.

...The Characters are of the box-headed variety of the southern alphabet resembling those of the other inscriptions of Pravarasēna II. The noteworthy peculiarities are the cursive form of the medial ū in sūnōḥ, line 4 ; the bipartite au in dauhitrasya, line 7 ; the medial ṛi, which is formed not by usual curling curve, but by the addition of a curve turned downwards on the left of k in -adhikṛitā, line 23; and the rare medial ḷi in kḷipt-lopakliptaḥ, line 31. The numerical symbols for 400 occur in line 20, and those for 2 and 3 on the second side of the second and the third plate respectively. The language is Sanskrit, and, except for two benedictive and imprecatory verses, the whole record is in prose. The orthography shows the usual reduplication of a consonant after r and before y ; see ārjjava-, line 9 and Bhāgiratty-,line6.

...The inscription is one of the Vākāṭaka Mahārāja Pravarasēna II.It opens with dṛishṭam. The genealogy of the king is given here exactly as in his other plates, his maternal grandfather being called Dēvagupta. The object of the inscription is to record the grant of 400 nivartanas of land by the royal measure, which Pravarasēna II made to a Brāhmaṇa named Rudrārya, who was versed in two Vēdas and belonged to the Vāji-Lōhitya gōtra². He was a resident of the village Ēkārjunaka. The land donated to him was in the village Vēlusuka which was situated in the Supratishṭha āhāra or subdivision. The village lay to the east of Gṛidharagrāma, to the south of Kadambasaraka, to the west of Nīlīgrāma and to the north of Kōkilāra. The plates were issued from the royal camp on the bank of
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¹ For another instance of a correction inserted in a wrong place, see above, p. 39, n. 1.
² A similar gotra, with Vāji prefixed to it, is Vāji-Kauśika mentioned in the Indore plates, line 15. In both these cases the donees may have belonged to the Vājasanēya śākhā of the Yujurveda.