South Indian Inscriptions

INSCRIPTIONS OF THE MAIN BRANCH

NO. 15 : PLATE XV
PĀṬNĀ MUSEUM PLATE OF PRAVARASENA II

...THIS plate was first brought to notice by Dr. A. S. Altekar, who edited it without facsimiles in the Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society, Vol. XIV, pp. 465 f. Its exact find-spot was long unknown. In his introductory remarks Dr. Altekar stated that it was found ‘somewhere in the Central Provinces’. Dr. K. P. Jayaswal remarked in his History of India, 150 A. D. to 350 A.D., p. 74, that it came from Jabalpur. Dr. Hiralal thought, on the other hand, that the present plate belonged to the set of three or four plates found near Rāmṭēk in Vidarbha, most of which are now missing¹. The present plate records the grant of a village and mentions its boundaries on all sides, but in the absence of definite information about its provenace none of the places could be satisfactorily identified. After a good deal of correspondence in 1936, I succeeded in settling the provenance of the plate, which enabled me to identify the places mentioned in it. I published a note on it in the Journal of the Nagpur University, No. II, pp. 48 f. I edit it here from an excellent facsimile of it, which I owe to the courtesy of the late Rai Saheb Manoranjan Ghosh, Curator of the Pāṭnā Museum.

... From the information supplied by Dr. P. N. Sen of Narsinghpur it seems that the plate was discovered in about 1919, while digging the foundation of the bungalow (or one of its out-houses) of the District Superintendent of Police at Bālāghāṭ. Dr. P. N. Sen, who was then Civil Surgeon at Bālāghāṭ, received the present plate from the District Superintendent of Police (whose name he could not recollect), and sent it to his brother Rai Bahadur Manmath Nath Sen. Dr. Sen does not know what became of the other plates of the set. Mr. M. N. Sen who was then was Sub-divisional Officer at Jamātrā, Santāl Pargaṇā, presented it to the Pāṭnā Museum through the Superintendent of Archaeological Survey, Central Circle, Pāṭnā. It has since then been deposited in that Museum.

...‘The plate measures about 7.25” by 4.2” at the ends; the length is, however, 7.5” in the middle. The thickness is .1”. It is quite smooth and nicely preserved ; hardly a single letter has been damaged. Its edges are neither fashioned thicker nor raised into rims. Letters are distinct, but not very deep, so that they do not show through on the reverse. The engraving is good. . . . . Towards the proper right of the plate, about an inch form the centre, there is a hole about .35” diameter. It was obviously intended for the ring to pass through, which must have for a long time connected this plate with the remaining ones of the set. The weight of the plates is 30 tōlās²â€™.

... The characters are of the box-headed variety of the southern alphabets. They resemble those of the other grants of the Vākāṭaka king Pravarasēna II. The only peculiarities that need be noted here are as follows:−The rare initial āi occurs in aihik-, line 7, and the subscript jh in Madhukajjharyyā in line 4. The medial i (short) is turned to the right in kuṭumbinō, line 5 ; the medial au is bipartite as in Kauṇḍiṇya, line 8 ; ḍ and d are clearly distinguished ; th is shown with a ringlet at the bottom as in Millukadratha-, line 3. The language is Sanskrit and the extant portion is wholly in prose. As regards orthography, the only peculiarity noticed
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¹ I.C.P.B.I., p. 5.
² J.B.O.R.S., Vol. XIV, pp. 465-66.