________________
No. 27-GUJARRA INSCRIPTION OF ASOKA
(1 Plate)
D. C. SIROAR, OOTACAMUND The hamlet of Gujarră lies in the Datia District of Vindhya Pradesh, near the village of Parābari on the Datia-Unao road, about 11 miles to the south-east of Datia and 12 miles to the north of Jhansi in U. P. At a little distance from the hamlet, there is a hill locally known as Siddhô-ki-toriya or the hillocks of the Perfected Ones'. The inscription under notioe is engraved on a boulder lying at the foot of this hill.
The inscription was discovered by Mr. Lal Chand Sharma, a forest contractor of Jhansi, who by chance came upon the inscribed rock while out a-hunting. Mr. Sharma showed some indistinct photographs and inaccurate eye-copies of the record to Dr. B. Ch. Chhabra, Deputy DirectorGeneral of Archaeology in India, at New Delhi, on the 30th November 1953. A glanse at them. was enough for Dr. Chhabra to recognise that the epigraph was one of the Rock Ediots of the celebrated Maurya emperor Asokal (c. 269-232 B.C.) and naturally he pressed Mr. Sharma for information regarding its exact findspot, so that he could visit the place in order to examine the inscription and take inked estampages of it for study and publication. But Mr. Sharma, who was under the impression that the document contained a clue to the existence of a hidden treasure in its neighbourhood, was not prepared to give the required information unless Dr. Chhabra would agree to share with him the treasure when brought to light as a result of his study of the record. Dr. Chhabra tried to convince him that such epigraphs do not contain any information regarding buried treasures, but in vain. He, however, followed up the matter until, thanks to the interest taken in the matter by Mr. J. 8. Lall, then Collector-in-Charge of Jhansi, Mr. Lal Chand Sharma and his younger brother, Mr. Lakhpat Ram Sharma, Municipal Commissioner of Jhansi, ultimately agreed to disclose the name of the findspot of the epigraph. They requested Dr. Chhabra to reach Jhansi on the 15th of November 1954 for being escorted to the spot. Although Dr. Chhabra oould not visit the place on that date, the two Sharma brothers took Mr. Lall to Gujarrå to show the insoription, and the discovery was announced in some daily papers. On the 5th of December 1984, Dr. Chhabra visited the village in the company of Mr. Lall, Mr. 8. K. Sen, Additional Deputy Commissioner of the Datia District, Dr. K. N. Puri, then Superintendent of the Department of Archaeology at Agra (Northern Circle), and the two Sharma brothers. He carefully examined the record and took inked impressions and photographs of it. Soon afterwards he incorporated the results of his study of the epigraph in a paper wbich was read at the Ahmedabad Session of the Indian History Congress in the last week of December 1954. In the course of my annual tour in search of inscriptions in the winter of 1954-55, I visited Gujarra for an examination of the record on the 5th of February 1956. Some time later Dr. Chhabra was kind enough to place at my disposal a oopy of his unpublished paper as well as his tentative transcript of the epigraph. and in February 1956 he was so good as to permit me to edit the inscription in the Epigraphia Indica.
The area occupied by the writing on the face of the boulder measures about 9 feet 5 inches in length and 1 foot 7 inches in height. There are only five lines of writing. An akshara is about 3 inches in height. Lines 2-5 begin from a distance of about 6 inches towards the left of the commencement of line 1. The fifth line, with which the epigraph ends, is shorter than the other lines. The letters are carefully engraved. But the preservation of the writing is not satisfactory. Some
1 Maoron over e and o has not been used in the article. • Dr. Chhabra's paper together with his transcript of the inscription has since appeared in Proc. lu('. Ahmedabad, pp. 68-71.
(205)
