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EPIGRAPHIA INDICA.
[VOL. XV
We have therefore to infer that Yuddhamalla first built the main body of the temple completely in the name of his grandfather Mallaparājul and later on added as an ornament to it the tower, on which occasion must have been engraved independently the part of the inscription contained in lines 37 to 46, the foregoing portion of the record having been engraved when the body of the temple was first built. Here I think Mr. Ramayya Pantulu is correct in his surmise that verse 5 and the passage coming after it form a separate inscription. But I do not believe with him that what follows this verse is the fragment of a sixth verse. It is extremely improLable that a verse would have been left unfinished as soon as it had been begun. On the contrary it is a prose passage conveying a message of the donor to later kings. It says: (This pillar (kunda) (is meant) for kings that recognise (odambadi) and maintain his (tana, viz. Yuddhamalla's) charity.
No. 27.-A NOTE ON THE BEZWADA PILLAR INSCRIPTION OF YUDDHAMALLA.
BY K. V. LAKSHMANA RAO, M.A., MADRAS This inscription in Telugu poetry has been recently published in Epigraphia Indica, Vol. XV, Part IV, pp. 150— 159, and is a very inportant contribution to the history of the Telugu language and literature. The earliest Telugu work hitherto known, Nannaya Bhatta's Mahabharata, belongs only to the middle of the 11th century A.D. Thus the Bezwada Pillar inscription takes the history of the Telugu literature at least two centuries back. That is a decided gain.
But more than this it has supplied a unique link that connects the various Dravidian languages. It was not hitherto known that the Telugu language ever possessed the sound ?, which is now claimed as the sole property of the Tamil and Malayalam languages and which is found in the Kanarese literature prior to the 12th century of the Christian era. The present inscription uses three words containing the sound and employs for it the same symbol as is found in the Kanarese inscriptions of that and the previous periods. We find the words lassi in 1. 14, alisina in 1 20 f., and yaliputa in 1. 35 of this inscription. The letter in these words was first read as d by Mr. Ramayya Pantulu when he published the inscription in the Telugu Academy Journal in 1916. But in the transcription of this inscription in the Epigraphia Indica he has assigned to it its proper value of ļ. [This was a proof correction by the Editor .........F. W.T.]
There can be no doubt that during the period when this inscription came into existence the Telagu-Kanarese character og had its value as ļ and not as d. Numbers of Kanarese and Sanskrit inscriptions of the Western and Eastern Chalukyas can be quoted in support of this view. In Yuddhamalla's inscription itself we find a symbol, the value of which is indisputably dused more than eleven times in its full form and seventeen times as a subscript letter in conjunct consonants showing only half of its form. We can therefore safely infer that the writer of the inscription never intended the symbol og to represent the sound d. Again the root ali of the words alisina and alipufa appears in the present Tamil and the old Kanarese with a similar sound and a similar meaning. It is therefore certain that the Telugus of the 9th century knew the sound !, which was distinct from, and in no way confounded with, d and ! It is also clear from the inscriptions of that period that a common symbol was used to represent this sound in both the Telugu and the Kanarese alphabets. We hitherto knew that several Dravidian languages had in common the peculiar consonant r, unknown to the classical Sanskrit
1 It is very probable that the templo built in the name of Mallaparkju is the Mallēsvara temple of Besavads
Vodabadi' of line 45 must be rem nodarbadi' according to the original. • See Kittel's Kanarese-English Dictionary and Brown's Telugu - English Dictionary.
