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ERIGRAPHIA INDICA.
[VOL. XIV.
No. 5.-HARAHA INSCRIPTION OF THE REIGN OF ISANAVARMAN: [VIKRAMA SAMVAT] 611.
BY PANDIT HIRANANDA SASTRI, M.A., M.O.L., LUCKNOW.
This inscription was brought to my notice in March 1915. The stone slab on which it is written was found, I am told, some time ago at a village near Haraba in the Bära Banki district in the estate of the Raja of Haraha. A Thakur of that locality took possession of it and, as has very often been the case with similar documents, used it for grinding spices. Some local Pandit reported the matter to Thakur Prithvipal Singh of Surajpur, who wrote to Rājā Raghu Raj Babadar Singh of Haraha and got hold of it. For some time it lay in the office of the "Lucknow Advocate," where it was shown to me by Mr. S. P. Sanyal, Rai Sahib, the Managing Editor of the Journal. The Hon'ble Mr. R. Burn, I.C.S., the Chief Secretary to the United Provinces Government, at my suggestion, has secured it for the Lucknow Museum, where it has now been deposited as a present from the said Raja of Harāhā.
It is incised with great care and neatness on a smooth slab of sandstone, which measures about 2' 2" by 1' 44". There are 22 lines of writing in it, cut in the characters of the northern class of Indian alphabets, resembling the Gupta script of about the 6th century A.D. The language used in the epigraph is Sanskrit verse throughout. Excepting a few slight injuries here and there, the inscription is in a very good state of preservation.
As to the orthography a few points are noticeable in the record. The writer has duplicated the symbol for k, when it is conjoined with ra; e.g., chakkra- in 1. 9. Consonants following the symbol for r are very often doubled as in dhatur-Mmaru- in 1. 10. The rules of Sandhi e at times disregarded, as in badhnamsaiva, 1. 9, instead of badhnannaiva. We find sigh in place of mh in 1. 2 and sh in 1. 13. Such a tendency to pronounce the aspirate à combined with a nasal like the aspirated guttural media is rather common in the north-west of India, where the word simha forming part of proper names is generally written and pronounced as singh. In 1. 15 dhrita is written for dhritä.
Two marks of punctuation are to be noticed in the inscription. One is a short horizontal saroke, which stands mostly for ardhavirama (half-stop), and the other is a double perpendicular line which indicates the completion of a stanza, or parnavirama, i.e., full-stop.
The composer of the inscription does not appear to have been a poet of a very high order or a Kavi par excellence. The tautological expressions which are to be met with in different places are too glaring for a real poet. But the prosody seems to be all right, and in v. 9 the exigencies of the metre have even caused the author to use a wrong form of a word, writing hriya for hriya, which would have offended against the scansion.
The author of the eulogy appears to be rich in vocabulary, though perhaps he did not hesitate to put in Prakrit words, the use of which will be instanced by the word -agara- in place of Sanskrit akara1 in 1. 11, unless we take ga to be a simple mistake for ka.
The object of the inscription is to record that in the year 611, Saryavarman, the accomplished son of the Maukhari king, féanavarman, while hunting, saw a small dilapidated
1 Agara (Banskrit akara) means a collection or mine. Cf. Sab gun ki agar dhiya, nak bin be häl,' a proverbial saying equivalent to "great braggers, little doers" (lit., you are a perfect mine of good qualities, my child, you only want a nose).
The word akuthinëna in line 8, which may be taken for akathisina or akufilina, may have been a Prakrit farm el. kurand, 'to fret" (from Sanak. krudh) or kufhna, "to beat mercilessly."
