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No. 11.]
NILGUND INSCRIPTION OF AMOGHAVARSHA I.
101
or Annigere, about twelve miles west of Gadag,- was governing the Beļvola three-hundred district. And it mentions also a relative of Dêvannayya, probably named Kulappayya, who was governing the circle of villages known as the Mugunda twelve. The object of it is to record an assignment of the tax on clarified butter or ghee. The assignment was made under
used to represent, indifferently, either kore (kero), 'tank,' or kéri,' s street ;' and it is impossible to decide which
as the final of a place-Dame, unless one can hear the name pronounced by resident of the village alf, or can find it in an ancient record. In cases in which I have been unable to ascertain whether the real termination is kere or kéri, I bave used that nondescript word keri, M & reminder to myself that the name has not been determined ; and it is for that reason that I have written, for instance, Kattageri, Bendigeri, and Hapnikeri (Dyn. Kan. Distrs. pp. 448, note 1, 526, 656). There is, perhaps, more trouble with the words kere and kéri than in any other detail. But no one, who has not tried it in person, can realise how difficult it is to get at the really correct and undeniable spelling of many & place-name, unless some indication is derivable from an ancient record. My experience is that, among modern publications, the older sheets of the Indian Atlas, though by no means infallible, are in many respects the best guide, in spite of the went of any definite system in them, or rather, because no attempt was made in them to sim, in vain, at any uniformity of system on lines whicb, at that time, had hardly become definitely fixed even among scholars. The revised sheets are not so useful a guide, because in them (as also in the Bombay Survey sheets) the spelling is adapted to the modern official system. The chief festores of this system are, the use of a, a, i, and, instead of w, a, ee, spd oo, and the use of d, instead of r, for the lipguald. It would be good enough, if it were in safe bands; that is to say, under the control of someone who could determine the exact correct spelling everywhere, and could enforce the uniform use of it. But it is not in such bands. It frequently gives the long á where it ought to give the short a, and vice versd. It has a particularly weak point, in failing to make any distinction between the dental d and the lingual d, which latter usually appears as r in the older sheets of the Indian Atlas. It has produced such monstrosities as . Kánara and Kánarese,'-(sopposed to be critical forms),- instead of the parely conventional but thoroughly well established words Kennta and Kanarese. And, as specific instances of the fsilure of this system in official hands, we may quote, from the Bombay Survey sheet No. 272 (1894), Kanyad and Kutvad, which are given there instead of Kanvád and Kutyád, and Shirti instead of Shirhatti, and, from sheet No. 239 (1887), Bagni, instead of Bagni (regarding these names, see Ind. Ant. Vol. XXIX. p. 278 and note 23, p. 276, and p. 277, note 17). The best way to determine the real name of a place, is, naturally, to make local inquiries in person. And it is, of course, the cultivators and the hereditary village-officials, not the district officials and their clerks, - who can best farnish information as to the true names of their villages. But what they pronounce, has frequently to be written down by an ordinary clerk who takes no real interest in the matter. And that is where all the mistakes come in now, and, apparently, came in in earlier times also.- In illustration of the way in which the cultivators can help towards the identification of socient places, we may refer to the case of Bagalkot in the Bijapur district. The cultivators call it BAgadikote. This name is accounted for, though the exact form of it is not absolutely justified, by the fact that the ancient name of the place was Begadageya kote, Bågadigeyakoțe (see Ep. Ind. Vol. II. p. 170). This name, adduced by the cultivators, first put me in the way of identifying Bågadage with Bagalkot. And, in addition to the epigraphic passage which I then quoted, I may now refer to a record of A.D. 1049 at Sirûr, eight miles on the south-east of Bagalkot, which mentions Bdgadagd-rdjapatha, "the highway to Bågadagå."In illustration of the way in which the cultivators preserve the real names of places, we may take the CAD of village close on the east of Gadag and incorporated with that town for municipal purposes. The name of it is certified in Bombay Places as 'Betgêri;' and, I may add, in the Dharwar volume of the Gasetteer it appears as Bettigeri'(pp. 712, 713), which illustrates very well the vagaries of official practice. But the cultivators call it Batgere. And the ancient name occurs as Battakere in record of A.D. 888. In this instance, it happens, the official mistake, of substituting kdri for kere, is carried back to A.D. 1379 by the Dambal grant, which mentions the place as Battagèri (loc. cit. in noto 2 on page 98 above, text line 125), evidently as the result of an ancient official failing to catch the name correctly, and it may be remarked that the same record also mentions as Knujagéri, in line 126, a neighbouring village, the name of which is found in a record of A.D. 933-34 as Kovujagere, or possibly Kovujamgere.- I would make, here, & correction in the name of a village in the Karajgi taluka, at which some early Kadamba copper-plate grants were obtained (see Ind. Ant. Vol. VII. p. 39 f.). The name of it figures in the Indian Atlas sheet No. 42 (1827) as 'Dew geeree, and in the Map of the Dharwar Collectorate (1874) Deogeree,' and in the Postal Directory (1879) Deogiri,' and in the Dharwar volume (1884) of the Gasetteer as Devgiri' (p. 665). I was told that the cultivators call the place Dévagere and Déogere. But I was assured that that is s mistake, and that the real name is Dévagiri. And I, therefore, gave the Dame as Dêvagiri in editing the grants in question, and elsewhere (e.g. above, Vol. V. p. 178). Subsequently, I was led to believe that the real name is Dêvagere; and I have used that form in, for instance, Dyr. Kan. Distrs. p. 287. But I have since then found, from records of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries at the place itself, that the ancient name was Devargeri, sometimes perhaps written Dövag@ri, without the anusedra in the second ayllable. I also notice that the Natire gentleman, to whom I was indebted in the first instance for impressions of them, wrote the name, on the first of the impressions, as Dévagiri in English characters (according to official custom),
