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EPIGRAPHIA INDICA.
[VOL. XVI.
Brahmanas and, curiously enough, to some Brahmana ladies also; it is a very rare thing to meet with the allotment of shares to women in the agraharas which are conferred on Brahmanas. It is stated that the agrahara was divided into two hundred and sixty-one vṛittis and that each vritti was further divided into five aisas, thus making a total of 1,305 amsas, and the gift to each donee is made in terms of the amsas. We learn that each tritti was sufficient to meet the needs of five persons; it appears that the shares were granted, perhaps, proportionate to the number of members in the family of a donee. In the existing plates of the set a total of one hundred and eighty-two vṛittis and one amsa are accounted for, and the plates seven, thirteen and fourteen, which are lost, should have contained an account of the distribution of the remaining seventyeight vṛittis and four amsas. The list of the donees, with the names of their fathers, their native villages, their sakhas and gōtras and the number of améas they received, is given in the "abstract of contents" at the end.
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From that list it would seem that most of the donees were residents of the Telugu country and had either already migrated into the Tamil country or had come down south at the invitation of the donor. Anyhow the record is of more than ordinary importance in that it accounts, like a few others, for the existence of a large number of Telugu Brahmana families in the Tinnevelly District. Themselves Telugus by birth and possessing strong liking for the men of their own country, speaking their own language, the Nayakas of Madara would have imported large colonies of Telugu Brahmanas from the north and settled them down in Madura and Tinnevelly Districts. At present there are numbers of Telugu Brahmana families in several villages in the Tiunevelly District, as, for instance, Tenkasi, Sermadevi, Pavar, Vellanguḍi, Pēṭṭai, Nalaṭṭinputtår, Köyilpaṭṭi, Tirunelveli and Elavělangal and in many villages in the Madura District. A parallel to this tendency to import their own countrymen, speaking their own tongue, is to be found in the Maratha Rajas of Tanjore, who planted a considerable colony of Maratha and Gurjara Brahmanas in the Tanjore kingdom, some of which families are now found scattered over the whole of the Madras Presidency, having at one time occupied the highest positions both in the British Government and in the Native States.
The present record is of great importance for the history of the Nayakas of Madura, which is not very clearly known. The late Mr. Nelson had attempted a continuous and fairly fall history of this dynasty of princes in his Madura Manual, from all available sources, such as Indian chronicles, traditions and manuscripts and a few inscriptions, as also the valuable records of the Jesuits of the Madura Mission. Attempts have been made quite recently by some others with the help of the same materials to reconstruct the history of this country and of this period, with, to my mind, no whit better success than that achieved by the pioneer, Mr. Nelson, All attempts at tracing Indian History merely from the sources referred to above have proved incomplete, if not always incorrect. It must be constructed mainly on the strength of inscriptions, supplemented largely from literary and other sources, wherever the latter do not militate against the statements made in inscriptions. Some amount of new information regarding the Nayakas of Madura has been brought to light in my articles on the Krishnapuram Plates of Sadasiva-deva-Mahārāya, the Dalavay-Agraharam Plates of Venkatapati-deva-Mahārāya and other records. The first of these deals with the reign of Krishnappa-Nayaka I, son of ViśvanathaNayaka, and the second with that of his son Vira-Bhupati, Virappa-Nayaka or Periya or PedaVirappa-Nayaka; the copper-plate grant under consideration belongs to the reign of the latter's son Krishna-Mahipati or Krishnappa-Nayaka II. Thus the three records belong to three consecutive reigns, and the last is of greater historical importance than the others. It is necossary therefore to discusa here the historical information contained in this inscription in the light of other epigraphical records.
1 See Vol. I, pp. 85-88, of the Travancore Archaeological Series; also pp. 145-146, ibid.
