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250 EPIGRAPHIA INDICA
[VOL. XXX No. 42—JANGALPADU PLATES OF SATRUBHANJ ADEVA
D. C. Sircar, Ootac mund In 1946 Mr. Satyanārāyaṇa Rājaguru published a copper-plate inscription of king Satrubhanja belonging to a branch of the celebrated Bhanja royal family of ancient Orissa. Ten years earlier the inscription was published by the same scholar in the Utkala Sahitya", an Oriya periodical of Cuttack. As regards the findspot and discovery of the plates, Mr. Rājaguru ebserves thus in his paper published in 1946: "About ten years back, a cultivator, while digging the earth, found these plates buried in a field near Jangalpāļu, & village situated' at a distance of ten miles to the north-east of Parlakimedi in the Ganjam District. I went to the village soon after I got information of this discovery, and carefully examined the charter.......... But, as the owner of the plates did not like to part with the charter, I had no other choice except taking their impressions at the spot...... A few months after this, I was told that the charter was handed over to a wanderer sannyāsi whose whereabouts are not known up till now, and consequently the plates are now missing."
Mr. Rājaguru thinks that the most important thing in the record is its date which has been read by him as Samvat 1012 Kārttika-6udi 101 i.e. 11). He refers the year 1012 to the Saka era and suggests that the charter belongs to 1090 A.D.' Apparently, however, Mr. Rajaguru did not notice that a paper on the same inscription by the late Mr. R. D. Banerji had been published as early as 1932. The charter is described by Banerji as the Tekkali Plates'. He further observes, "I came to learn of the existence of this important inscription from Mr. Paramananda Acharya, B. So., Senior Archaeological Scholar of the Mayurbhanj State in May or June, 1929. Subsequently, at my request, Mr. Acharya supplied me with the pencil rubbings from which the inscription is edited below. I have not been able to elicit the name of the owner of these plates and their present locality from Mr. Acharya." The plates were thus discovered at least seven years earlier than the time suggested by Mr. Rājaguru, although their association with Tekkali, also in the Ganjam District, instead of Jangalpādu near Parlakimedi, as indicated by Banerji, may be wrong. Like Mr. Rajaguru, Banerji also spoke of the importance of the date of the inscription, which, however, he read as Samvat 8 100 Kärttika-sudi 8. He took the year of the date to be 800 which he referred to the Vikrama era. Thus, according to Banerji, the inscription urder discussion belongs to 732 A.D. Dr. R. C. Majumdar, who had occasion to consult Banerji's paper, thinks that the reading of the date is doubtful but says that on palæographic considerations also this plate may be referred to the eighth century A.D.'
I had recently an occasion to examine the inscription from its facsimile published along with the papers of Banerji and Rājaguru and found that, apart from the many misprints in the published transcripts of the record, numerous passages of the inscription, including the one containing its date, have been 'wrongly read. The reading of the last line of the record is quite clearly Samvat 10 4 Kärttika-sudi 10 1 (ie. Samvat 14 Karttika-Sudi 11). The symbol for 10 which is practically the same as quoted by Ojha from a Vākāțaka record in his Palaeography of India (in Hindi), Plate LXXIIIa, was wrongly read by Banerji as 8, although Rājaguru read it correctly. The second symbol in the year, which also occurs in other early Orissan records and
1 Journal of the Kalinga Historical Research Society, Vol. I, No. 2, Septomber, 1946, pp. 181 T. and Plates. * Vol. XXXII, Part VII, 1936.
JKHRS, loc. cit., p. 181. Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society, Vol. XVIII, Part III, 1932, pp. 387 ff. and Plates. J BORS, loc. cit., p. 387. • 'Outline of the History of the Bhanja Kings of Orisau ', reprinted from the Dacca University Studies, p. 3.
