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No. 19.]
TWO KADAMBA GRANTS FROM SIRSI.
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of the engraver's tool. The grant is engraved on the inner sides of the first and last plates, and on both sides of the middle one. The plates are pierced by a circular hole in order to receive the ring and seal, which are attached. The ends of the ring are, as in the case of the plates of Ravivarman, soldered on to the back of a seal, which, in this instance, is oval in shape and bears a device. The seal has a raised rim, and inside this there is shown in low relief the figure of a quadruped (perhaps a horse) facing left. The weight of the plates, including the ring and seal, is 52 tolas. Each engraved side contains four lines of writing; there are thus sixteen lines in all. Excepting isolated letters which are worn away and now become partly illegible, the record is in a perfect state of preservation, and can be deciphered without any uncertainty.
The characters belong to the southern variety, and have close affinities with those of other grants of the Kadamba kings. They differ palpably from the characters of the grant of Ravivarman described above and appear to belong to a later paleographic epoch. The vowel a in na is written by bending back the last downward stroke in an upward direction; e.g. in 11. 2, 3, etc. One notices the tendency of the vertical lines to slope, a feature which later develops into the spiral formation of Hala-Kannada letters. Noteworthy is also the doubling of the left limb of g (11. 1, 2, 6, 8, etc.) and (II. 4, 7, etc.). This record contains the earliest specimen hitherto known, in a southern alphabet, of the initial ri (1. 8). Initial a occurs in 1. 5; initial & in l. 4, 6; initial u in 11. 11, 13; initial e in 1. 7; the gn of final t in 1. 7, and final n in 1. 11. One ligature, with the word containing it, has remained undeciphered in 1. 10; I have never come across the sign anywhere before and can suggest no reading for it.-The language of the inscription is Sanskrit, and, with the exception of the imprecatory and admonitory stanzas at the end, the text is in prose. The main part of the text (11. 1-11) forms a single sentence and states, like the foregoing grant of Ravivarman, without much circumlocution the object of the record. The attributes qualifying the donor are of the stereotyped form. In its brevity this record resembles the grant of Ravivarman described above.
The inscription is one of the Dharma-Mahārāja Krishṇavarman of the Kadamba family. The hitherto known records of the Kadamba dynasty have revealed the existence of two Krishnavarmans in the family. And, as the present record neither gives the genealogy of this king nor mentions any circumstance which would help to establish his identity, it is difficult to affirm with certainty whether he is to be identified with either the one or the other Krishnavarman already known, or whether he is a new king altogether; but on palæographic considerations this king may tentatively be identified with the second Kadamba king of that name, whose Bannahalli (now Halebid) grant,' dated in the seventh year of his reign, has already been published. The grant proper records (11. 6-11) that on the full moon day in the month of Karttika, in the nineteenth year of his reign, Krishnavarman granted Kamakapalli in the Girigada village (grāma) of the Karvannaḍa district (vishaya) to a Brahmana of the Vārāhi götra, named Sōma-svamin, who was a student of the Rig-vēda, and a performer of the Soma sacrifice, making the village free from all taxes and dues.
To the proposed identification of the Krishnavarman of our record with the Krishnavarman of the Bannahalli grant it may be objected that the title Dharma-Maharaja, which is here used along with the name of the donor, is not found coupled with the name of Krishnavarman II. in any other record; thus, for instance, in the Bannahalli grant itself, which is dated in the seventh year of the reign, only the shorter title Maharaja is prefixed to Krishnavarmin's name. On the other hand, the earlier Krishnavarman is invariably styled DharmaMaharaja in the preambles of the later Kadamba grants. The objection is not valid; for it should be noted that Krishnavarman I. was, according to all accounts, performer of a
i Ep. Ind., Vol. VI, p. 18 and plate.
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