________________
No. 23]
BHADRAK INSCRIPTION OF GANA ; REGNAL YEAR 8
171
that double consonants began to appear in such records in the third century A.C. As our inscription shows the use of double consonant only in one case (cf. ayya in line 2, for Sanskrit ārya, instead of the earlier epigraphic Prakrit form aya), it may reasonably be assigned to the same third century. That it has to be assigned to a date carlier than the fourth century is suggested again by the Susunia inscription of king Chandravarman who ruled over South-West Bengal (adjacent to North-East Orissa in which Bhadrak, the findspot of our record, is situated) about the middle of the fourth century A. C. and was defeated by the mighty Gupta emperor Samudragupta. The language of the Suçunia inscription is Sanskrit and suggests that Prakrit was ousted from the inscriptions of that area at an earlier date.
The Bhadrak inscription begins with traces of a short horizontal line which appears to stand for the usual siddham symbol. This is followed by the word Mah[@]r[a]ja. The following two aksharas read: sir[i], although traces of the vowel-mark are not distinct above the second akshara. This is because the stone is broken here. What comes next has to be read as Ganasa. The tops of all these three letters are damaged owing to the breaking away of a piece of stone as well as to corrosion about the upper parts of the second and third aksharas; but there is hardly any doubt about the reading. Then comes Sa[m 81). Traces of the anusvāra above sa are faintly visible; but the upper right side of the letter is completely corroded. The symbol for 8, which here resembles the 8 sign reproduced by Ojha from the inscriptions of the Kuhsäņa age in his work, Plate LXXI, i (cf. the third symbol for 8) is partially corroded, traces of the lost part being fortunately still slightly visible. The danda that follows the numeral is indicated here by a short vertical line. The first half of line 1, besides the siddham symbol at the beginning, thus reads: Mahārāja-siriGanasa San 8, in Sanskrit Mahārāja-sri-Ganasya Sam 8 (-samvatsarē ashtamē). The inscription is therefore dated in the eighth regnal year of a king called Mahārāja sri-Gaņa. The name cannot be read as Guna as there is absolutely no trace of any u-mātrā attached to g. With the name of the king mentioned in our record, we may compare that of Mahāsainyapati fri-Gaņa, known from the Hayungthal copper-plate inscription of king Harjaravarman of Assam. In both these cases, fri appears to be an honorific and not an integral part of the name. That the name of the king mentioned in the Bhadrak inscription is most probably Gaņa and not Srigaņa seems to be suggested by the fact that, unlike Srigana, Gana (literally meaning the god Gaņēša or an attendant of Siva) is actually known to have been used as a personal name in ancient India. Gana is the name of the author of the celebrated work entitled A évāyurvēda, while the Matsya Purana speaks of a götra-kāra named Gana.
The second half of line 1 of our inscription reads : [M]ūlajap[ēna] d[ējvā 3 dat[a]. The upper part of mū is corroded. Although the tracas now visible would rather suggest a slightly earlier form of m than that of the other cases of the letter in the record, the akshara in question can hardly be read as anything else than mū. Parts of na are much corroded and the letter is really unrecognisable. Mülajapa (literally meaning 'a mutterer of the mula-mantra, i.e., a particular sacred text or sounds') is a personal name, while the word dēva has been apparently used in the sense of 'an image of a god' as in the Manusmriti (VIII, 87) and other works. Thus the above sentence
1 For the points raised, see Siroar's Successors of the Satavahanas, 1939., pp. 87 and notes, 166; IHQ, Vol. XV, pp. 88 ff. ; Ind. Cult., Vol. I, pp. 501-2. . .
• Select Inscriptions, pp. 341-42.
· Soe Kämarüpasasanavali, p. 51. Harjaravarman flourished in the first half of the ninth century A.C., As one of his inscriptions is dated in the Gupta year 510 (829-30 A.C.).
* Cf. Monier-Williams, Sanskrit-English Dictionary, B.v. ; Sabdakalpadruma, B.v.
Kieth, A History of Sanskrit Literature, p. 465. • Chapter 109, verso 2. The Mahabharata (critical edition, I, 59, 31) sooms to mention a demon chief named
Glads.
