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No. 39.)
TWO HARSOLA GRANTS OF PARAMARA SIYAKA OF V. S. 1005.
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A and the son's, as B. At the left hand bottom of the second plate of grant A is incised the figure of flying Garuda holding a snake in his left arm. The Garuda symbol is found on some of the Rashtrakūta records, the newly discovered Ahmadābād grant of V. S. 1026 of Siyaka himself and the plates of the Paramāra princes Vākpati-Muñja and Bhāja, the son and the grandson, respectively, of Siyaka of these grants.
The grant A has 27 lines of writing, 16 being written on the first and 11 on the second plate. In grant B, there are 29 lines, 13 in the first plate and 16 in the second. The first plate has been more carefully engraved. The writer of the grant B began with bold letters and had to compress the concluding few lines within a short space, the penultimate line being incised practically on the edge and the last word written vertically on the right hand margin.
The characters used in the plates belong to the northern class of alphabets prevalent in the 10th century A.D. and generally resemble the letters of contemporary inscriptions, e.g., the Partābgarh inscription of the time of the Pratihāra Mahendra pāla II, dated Samvat 1003. The use of the archaic as well as the advanced forms of letters in these two grants would indicato that the alphabet employed in them was undergoing a change during the period 'to which they belong. A few examples may be given to illustrate this point. Initial a is found in at least three different forms, (cf. a in adsishta, in grant A, line 19 and grant B, line 21 and in anumantavyah, ir grant B, line 25). In grant A, the initial e is a triangle with the apex at the bottom (line 8). Of the consonants, kha occurs in grant A in the older form with loops to the left of each of the two verticals; while in grant B it approximates to the modern Nägart form (see kha in l. 3). In grant A, ta occurs more frequently in the earlier form in which the top vertical is straight and the lower limb consists of two curves, the one on the right being at times longer. In grant B, the modern form of ta where the right curve is merely the continuation of the top vertical, is more predominant. The letter pha occurs in grant A in a rare form resembling the Greek .
Regarding orthography, it may be noted that no distinction is observed between va and ba, 88 in most of the inscriptions of the period. Dental sa is substituted for sa in visāla (line 11). The ha of simha is changed into gha in two places (1l. 1 and 6). The use of the anusvāra is generally preferred to that of the class nasal ; in some cases both the anusvāra and the class nasal are used (cf. avalambita, grant A, line 11). Some mistakes are repeated in both the grants, e. g., trina is written as trina in trināgra (grant A, line 16; grant B line 17). With t, the following ka, ja, na, ma and va and the preceding t are generally doubled.
The language is Sanskrit. Except for the opening verse in honour of the Man-lion incarnation of Vishnu, the three verses describing the pedigree of the donor and the two imprecatory verses at the end, the documents are in prose throughout.
The grants open with an invocation of the God Vishnu in his Nrisimha incarnation. Then follows the mention of the two kings Amoghavarsha and Akālavarsha, with the epithets Paramabhaffäraka, Maharajadhiräja, and Paramēsvara. The latter, who is mentioned as meditating on the feet of the former, has the two additional epithets Prithvivallabha and Srivallabha-narendra.
1 Abovo VOL. XIX, p. 177
Above Vol. XIV, pp. 176 & 188,
