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No. 31.)
BHANDUP PLATES OF CHHITTARAJADEVA.
257
6.e. Konkana) fourteen-hundred." Sthanaka is the present Thāns itself. Nägapura has not been identifitd. But Surpäraka is Sõpārā or Supärā, near the coast, 'in the Bassein täluka of the Thāņa District, some thirty miles north of Bombay. And Chēmuls or Chēmilya is Chēmwal, Chēul, Chaul, on the coast, in the Alibag taluks of the Kolāba District, about twenty-five miles south of Bombay. Thus, the Puri or Konkaņa fourteen-hundred seems to answer fairly closely to the Bassein, Sålsette, Bhiwndi, and Kalyān tälukas, with perhaps also the Karjat täluka of Thapa, and the Panwēl, Pen, and Alibag talukas of Kolába.
As regards other local places, the record registers the grant of a field, presumably a large one, in a village named Nõura (line 42), which it places in the Shatshashți-vishaya and in (the territory of) “the famous Sthanaka." This last name, Sthanaka, is, of course, the earlier form of the present Thāņēm, Thāņa. Shashashți is the present Sashți, Sālsette the island which forms the taluka of which the head-quarters station is at Thiņs : its name means “sixty-six," and marks it as having consisted originally of a group of sixty-six villages : this name is found in the intermediate form of Sāsaţi in the Thāns plates of the Dēvagiri-Yadava king Ramachandra dated in A.D. 1272.5 In defining the field that was granted, the record tells us that it was bounded on the east and north-east by Gomvaņi; on the south by Gorapavali; and on the west by the king's high-way. We may safely follow Professor Bühler in identifying Nõurs with a village in the Sālsette tāluka shown as
Nowobur' in the Indian Atlas sheet 25 (1854), in lat. 19° 9', long. 73° 1', about two miles south-south-west from Thāna, and Gomvaņi with the Gowhan' of the same map, about half & mile north-by-east from Nowohur,' which, it may be added, is shown about one mile and & half north-east from Bhandup: these two villages, however, do not exist now: the Atlas quarter-sheet 25, N.E. (1905), marks the places which they occupied as being now waste land on the foreshore of the Thāņa Creek. The maps do not show any representative of Gorapavali, which must have been somewhere on the east of Noura, and perhaps was a hamlet (palli, vali) of that place : this village must have disappeared even before the other two.7
1 The form Kumkana occurs in line 79 and again in line 84: in line 65 the record presents the more usual form Komkaņa - Konkaņa.
? Regarding this name see the next noto.
• The text, line 41, uses the expression fri-Sthanaka : and the same combination occurs in line 65 of the Bhädäna grant of A.D. 997; in the Thaņa plates of A.D. 1017; and in line 77 of the Kharēpatan plates of A.D. 1095 (for these records see note 2 on p. 252 above). There might be a temptation to take the original name as Sristbänska. But it seems to be fixed as simply Sthēnaks, not only by the modern name, but also by line 86 of the Bhadana grant ; tach=cha Sthanakë dhruan: and it was so taken by Professor Kielhorn. Also, there was a practice of prefixing another fri to names beginning with that word itself: see my Gupta Inscriptions, p. 8, note 3; and as another instance add fri-Sridharah from Ind. Ant., vol. 6, p. 212, line 17.
• The modern name is certified as Sashti in the compilation "Bombay Places and Common Official Wordo" published in 1878. it must be a contraction of sasashfi as an earlier form of the Marathi sa sasit, 'sixty-six'; but the corruption Salsette' seems to point rather to a form iadsashf, safashf. • JRAS, first series, vol. 5, p. 183.
Nowohur' is not to be confused with the 'Nahur' of the quarter-sheet, which is shown in the old full sbeet as Nawoor,' about one mile west-by-south from Nowohur.'
Nowohur' and Gowhan' seem to have disappeared between 1864 and 1879, as their names are not in the Postal Directory of the Bombay Circle which was published in 1879: the facts about Gowhan, however, are not quite clear, as the Directory of 1888 (second edition) sbows a Gawbón' with Thans as ito post-town. A consideration of the statements of the record, with an inspection of the maps, will show tbat Görajavali cannot have been au earlier name of Bhandup, as was thought by Professor Bühler.
