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No. 44]
DOMMARA-NANDYALA PLATES OF PUNYAKUMARA; 10TH YEAR
273
were situated in this territory of the three villages, the first and the last are situated on the northern bank of the river Pennar while the second, identified with the village Paidēla, is on the southern bank of the Kundern, a tributary of the Pennär. It is strikingly singular that neither of these rivers is mentioned in the record. The only other inscription which mentions Hiranyarishtra is, as far as I know, the Mālēpadu plates which state that the village Biripāsu wherein the gift lands were situated, lay in Hiranyarashtra and was on the southern bank of Suprayogā. Basing his conclusions on the probable identity of this village with Billupādu situated about 4 miles to the south of Pennar in the Atmakur taluk of the Nellore District, the late Rao Bahadur C. R. K. Charlu surmised that this territorial division must have included in it the northern and the western parts of the present Nellore District. Mr. M. S. Sarma has pointed out that the river Suprayogā identified with Pennār must have formed a natural boundary between the Mundarashtra on the north and the Hiranyarashtra on the south, as the villages Uruvupalle and Biriparu, the one situated in the former and the other in the latter of these territorial divisions, lay on the river's northern and the southern banks respectively. But if the identification of the villages mentioned in the record under review is correct, it clearly points out that Hiraṇyarashtra extended even to the north of the river, in fact more in this direction than towards its south. In his Notes on the Ancient Political Geography of South India', while attempting to fix the boundaries of Mundarashtra, my colleague Mr. M. Venkataramayya, M.A., has identified the river Suprayoga
Above, Vol. XI, p. 339. An inscription of Rashtrakūta Krishna III (A.D. 939-968) from Pushpagiri in the Cuddapah District has been cited as furnishing yet another reference to this province (J.O. R., Vol., XI, p. 363). The inscription is in Kannada and the relevant portion construed as referring to this territory reads as follows
1. 15 int-i dharmavan-ara.
16 [num honna madi Muļuki 17 nädanāļdu maharajyam 18 geyvaru i dharmavanu kam19 disade nadasidade, etc.
(8. 1. 1., Vol. IX, Part I, No. 69.) On examining the impression of the epigraph, the words honna muli are unmistakably clear. As it is, the reading presents some syntactical difficulties which, however, can be got over by considering the words i dharmavann repeated in 1.18 as redundant, and taking the expression horns midi to mean having made fruitful(?)'. But the usage of this phrase in this sense seerns to be very rare. If honna widi is to be considered a mistake for Honna. vadi, we have certainly a territorial division of this name in this tract which could no doubt have formed part of the aneient Hiranyarashtra inasmuch as Pushpagiri irr the Cuddapah taluk is not far removed from that part of the Jammalamadugu taluk which we now definitely know formed part at least of this territorial division. But the evidence afforded by this record for establishing the identity sought between Hiranyarashtra and Honnavādi, taking the latter as a vernacular rendering of the former, is unsatisfactory not only on account of the uncertainty of the interpretation of the readings, as we have already observed, in the epigraph but also for the great disparity in date between the two records.
An. Rep. on 8.1. Epigraphy, 1935-36, p. 56. Journal of the Madras University, 1940, p. 140.
The main reason adduced by Mr. Surma for identifying Suprayoga with Pennar seems to be that Mundarashtra of which the former forms the southern boundary corresponded with the Kovur taluk of the Nellore District and Pennar being the only prominent river flowing through this tract, it (Suprayoga) could, without any hesitation, be safely identified with the Pennar'. The evidence cited from the various Puranas in support of this identification presents certain difficulties in our accepting it. All the rivers according to these Puranas are said to have originated from the Sahyadri. Mr. X. Lakshminarayan Rao kindly drew my attention to the fact that the river Pennár takes its origin not in the Sahyadri which is usually identified with the Western Ghats, but in the small hill-range round the Nandi-bills in the Kolar District of the Mysore plateau. These bills are no doubt far removed and isolated from the Western Chats and could hardly be considered as part of these Ghats though perhaps, in the days when these Puranas were composed, they were included in the Sahyadri or possibly the composers of the Puranus inadvertantly made a mis-statement in saying that this river, viz., Suprayoga, alung with the other well-known rivers, took its origin in the Sahyadri. XVI-1-5
