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No. 83.)
KHADIPADA IMAGE INSCRIPTION OF SUBHAKARA
No. 33.-KHADIPADA IMAGE INSCRIPTION OF THE TIME OF SUBHAKARA
By A. Gaosa, M.A., New DELHI Khadipada is a small village, about 24 miles to the south-east of Bhadrak, a subdivisional town in the Balasore District, and about 8 miles to the north-west of Jajpur, an important town in the Cuttack District. I visited the place in May 1940, on the basis of some valuable information from Professor G. S. Das, B.A. (London), Secretary, Provincial Museum, Cuttack ; and found that the remains of the place consisted of a low mound and some Buddhist sculptures, including some colossal statues of the Buddha, all of which bespeak the former existence of a modest Buddhist establishment at the place. Among other sculptures I found a half-buried image of Padmapāņi (height 41'), which was fully dug out in my presence and revealed the existence of an inscription on its proper left edge. The image has now been removed to the Provincial Museum, Cuttack, and I am thankful to Professor Das for supplying me with two inked impressions of the inscription as well as for consenting to my editing it in the pages of this journal.
The inscription consists of only one line and is about 4' in length. The letters are earefully engraved, their size ranging from to 1*'. As regards orthography, attention may be drawn to the doubling of the consonants m and n after r in dharmma and utkirnna, and of before r in süttradhära; contrast, however, acharya. A curious mistake occurs in the word Rahularuchinām, the correct form being -näma. The record is undated but palæographical considerations load us to ascribe it to the seventh century A. D. The characters are more or less similar to those of the Ganjam plates of Sasanka', which, being of an undisputable date, form an important land mark in South-eastern Palæography. A point which should be noted here is that though the letter bh presents an earlier form in this inscription, the letter å has certainly a later form. Generally speaking, however, the difference in age between these two inscriptions could not have been very great.
The inscription refers itself to the time of Subhakara, who, to judge from the name, no doubt belonged to the Bhauma dynasty. The genealogy of the Bhatma kings was in a great confusion till recently owing to the different readings of the dates in their inscriptions and to the indeterminateness of the era to which they were to be referred. However, with the discovery of the Talcher plates of Sivakara', the genealogy, irrespective of the readings of the numerical symbols, can now be regarded as fairly established. According to the genealogy worked out by Misra on the basis of the available data there were four kings of the name of Subhākara, the Neulpar plates belonging to the first king of that name. If we compare the letters of the present inscription with those of the Neulpur grant, we find that the latter have on the whole a more developed appearance. Thus, the letter ch in the latter has a proto-Nagari form, while this in. scription has the archaic Gupta type. Particularly noticeable is the difference between the forms of the letter bh : while the letter in our inscription has a straight horizontal baseline, the Neulpur grant has & hollow (or even filled up) wedge attached to the lower left corner of the latter. The letter h is denoted by two signs in the present inscription, one being of the so-called Western Gupta type, very similar in appearance to bh (cf. ha in mahā) and the other a screw like form (cf. hu in
1 Above, Vol. VI, p. 143. *B. Misra, Orissa under the Bhauma Kings, p. 40. • Ibid., p. 71.
*Above, Vol. XV, 1. The date of the plates has been read as 8 by the editor, B4 by Mistra (loc. cit.), and 200 4 by Bhandarkar (List of Inscriptions of Northern India, No. 1751n.). The genealogy proposed by Bhan. darkar on p. 380 of his List can no longer be accepted.
