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No. 42-TWO INSCRIPTIONS OF THE TIME OF GANAPATI
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D. C. SIRCAR, OOTACAMUND
About the end of the year 1952, I visited Gwalior with the purpose of attending the Fifteenth Session of the Indian History Congress and examining the inscriptions preserved in the Gwalior Museum. Among the epigraphs copied by me in the said Museum two were stone inscriptions1 belonging to the reign of the Yajvapala king Ganapati (known dates between 1292 and 1300 A.D.) of Nalapura (modern Narwar in the Shivapuri District of the former Gwalior State). These two epigraphs are edited in the following pages. They have both been noticed by several scholars. The first of them, stated to have been originally found at Surwāyā in the Shivapuri District of the former Gwalior State, was noticed by Hirananda Sastri in the Annual Report of the Archaeological Survey of India, 1903-04, Part II, pp. 286 f., and this notice was followed in D. R. Bhandarkar's List of Inscriptions in Northern India, No. 636, and H. N. Dvivedi's Gwalior Rajyake Abhilekh, No. 163. But unfortunately Sastri's notice of the inscription contains some errors, the most important of which is that the epigraph does not record the benefactions of Rāņā Adhigadeva of the Muchchhaka family but of Ranaka Chachigadeva of the Lubdhaka dynasty. The other epigraph, found at Narwar in the same District, was noticed by A. Cunningham, ASIR, Vol. II, p. 315; F. Kielhorn, Ind. Ant., Vol. XXII, p. 81; M. B. Garde, ibid., Vol. XLVII, p. 241, and Annual Report of the Archaeological Department of the Gwalior State, V. S. 1971, No. 8; D. R. Bhandarkar, op. cit., No. 642; and H. N. Dvivedi, op. cit., No. 174. .It has been said that the eulogy in question was composed by Siva, son of Lohada. Actually, however, the poet's name was Śivanābhaka who was the son of Lōhața. The name of the person responsible for writing the letters on the stone is given as Amarasimha, though it is really Arasimha. There seems also to be some confusion about the week-day in the date of the record, which has sometimes been taken to be Friday, although it is actually Thursday. In any case, the published notices of both the inscriptions appear to be based on their inaccurate and incomplete transcripts since some of the interesting informations supplied by them have been altogether ignored.
The inscriptions contain each a eulogy recording the construction of a step-well during the reign of the Yajavapāla monarch Ganapati. An interesting feature of these epigraphs as well as some others of the type belonging to the time of the Yajvapala kings of Nalapura (modern Narwar) is that they speak of a number of people who settled in the Yajvapala dominions from Gōpadri or Göpächala (modern Gwalior). This was no doubt the result of the extinction of Hindu rule and establishment of the hold of the Turkish Muhammadans at Gwalior. A number of these displaced people appear to have been of Mathura Kayastha origin. Some of them (or at least their ancestors) were probably servants of the Hindu kings of Gwalior and a good many of them appear to have been absorbed in the services under the Yajvapala kings of Nalapura. The inscriptions also show that some of the Kayasthas of the Mathura community were assiduous students of Sanskrit literature and composed poems of no mean order.
1. Surwaya Inscription of V. S. 1350
The inscribed stone is a squarish slab, the lines of writing being engraved on an excavated bed leaving a raised margin on all the four sides. There are 23 lines in the inscription, the last of
1 These are Nos. 145 and 142 of 4. R. Ep., 1952-53, App. B. See ibid., Nos. 139 and 141; below, Vol. XXXIII, pp. 31 ff. See above, Vol. XXX, p. 148.
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