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No. 28-RAJULA-MANDAGIRI INSCRIPTION OF ASOKA
(2 Plate)
D. C. SIRCAR, OOTACAMUND
In a letter dated the 14th September 1946, Mr. T. G. Aravamuthan, a keen student of ancient Indian history and an Advocate of the Madras High Court, sent for examination to the Government Epigraphist for India an eye-copy of the beginning of an old Brāhmi insoription, which he had reproduced from an old record abont thirty years previously. Just then he could not remember the source from which the eye-copy had been taken down ; but he correctly noticed that some of the letters of the inscription looked like Brāhmi characters found in the edicts of Asoka. Unfortunately it was not possible to make out anything from the eye-copy and Mr. Aravamuthan was searching for his notes to trace its source. In another letter, dated the 14th March 1947, he informed the Government Epigraphist for India that he had reproduced the eye-copy of the inscription from the following volume of the Mackenzie Manuscripts preserved in the Madras Government's Oriental Manuscripts Library : 'Local Records, Vol. 29, Sheet 28, Title 55 : Inscriptions on Stone and Copper in the Aundavanny Mangala Dinne and Punoha Pallem Districts.Transcribed in Local Records, Vol. 23.' He also wrote in this connection that the inscription is stated in the said source to be in a dona opposite the west Gopuram of Pedda Rāmalinga Devālayam in the southern part of a village called Rājula-Maņdagiri in the Panchapalayam Taluk in the District of the same name. As the List of Villages in the Madras Presidency does not refer to places called Pañchapalayam and Rajula-Mandagiri, the findspot of the insoription may be, he suggested, no other than Mandigiri in the Adoni Taluk of the Bellary District,
The discovery of the eye-copy in the Mackenzie Manuscripts points to the date when it was prepared. Colin Mackenzie, born in 1754, was appointed to the Sappers in Madras and arrived in India in 1783. He was appointed the first Surveyor-General of India in 1815 and died in 1821. Soon after his arrival in South India, Mackenzie contacted certain Brāhmana Pandits and realised the importance of collecting manusoripts and studying their contents for an evaluation of Indian culture. In the thirtyeight years of his stay in India, he collected innumerable manuscripts in Sans. krit, Arabic and Persian as well as in the South Indian languages, of which the Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian manuscripts were sent to England. His collection aleo included transcripts of numerous inscriptions on stone and oopper plates. After his death, Mackenzie's South Indian collection was purchased by the East India Company and their catalogue in two volumes, prepared by H. H. Wilson with the assistanoe of Mackenzie's Pandits, was published from Calcutta in 1828. The manuscripts were afterwards deposited first in the library of the Madras College, then in the library of the Presidency College, and ultimately in the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Madras. It seems that the eye-copy of the Rājula-Mandagiri insoription was prepared for Mackenzie sometime about the beginning of the ninteenth century.
In February 1948, Mr. N. Lakshminarayan Rao, then Superintendent for Epigraphy, visited the village of Mandigiri in the Bellary District in search of the epigraph. But no such inscription cou'll be traced there. In December 1952, in the course of his annual tour in search of inscriptions, Mr. M. Venkataramayys, then Epigraphical Assistant in the office of the Government Epigraphist for India, visited Pattikonda which is the headquarters of a Taluk of that name in the Kurnool Distriot and lies about 8 miles from the Tuggali Station on the Guntakal-Bezwada line of the Southern Railway. There he heard of a locality called Rājula-Mandagiri lying at a distance of about 1 Macron over e and o has not been used in the article. -
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