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No. 54-CHANDIL STONE INSCRIPTION
(1 Plate) D. C. SIROAR, OOTACAMUND
(Received on 23.3.1958) In November 1957 I received an impression of a stone inscription for examination from Mr. A. C. Banerji of the Mid-Eastern Circle of the Department of Archaeology, Patna. The inscribed stone was found by the Circle officers at the village of Chandil in the Singhbhum District of Bihar. The stone slab was originally the lintel in the doorway of an old temple destroyed long ago. A new temple was later constructed on the foundation of the old one.
The inscription is written in three lines; but the third line is very small. The beginning of the second line is ahead of the first whilė line 3 begins ahead of line 2. The incision of the letters is deep and most of them can be seen clearly from the back of the impression. But the impression itself suffers from indifferent in king. The space covered by the writing is about 251 inches in length and about 34 inches in height.
The characters of the record resemble those in the epigraphs of the age of the early Palas and may be assigned to a date in the eighth or ninth century A.D. on palaeographical grounds. Both the Dēvanāgari and Bengali types of the anusvāra are used in the epigraph.
The language of the inscription is Sanskrit ; but it is very corrupt there being a number of grammatical and orthographical errors. An interesting orthographical feature is the indiscrimje nate use of 6 and 8 in the words Satata (Sanskrit satata), futa (Sanskrit suta) and sira (either Sanskrit firas or a mistake for Siva).
The inscription, written in three sentences, bears neither any date nor the name of the ruler of the country. Its object is to record the construction of a dēvakula or temple, apparently at Chandil in the Singhbhum District where the inscribed stone has been found, by a person named Dāmappa who was the son of Bhögulla. This is indicated by the last sentence of the record which reads: Bhögullasya futa-Dāmappēna dēva kula sthäpitan (i.e. Bhögullasya sutēna Dāmappena dēvakulan sthāpitam). The name Dāmappa seems to be of Kannada origin and the original home of the family to which the person belonged may have been in the southern part of India. The name of the deity for whom Dāmappa built the shrine is not clear from the context. But the person is introduced in the first sentence o sthe record as a devotee of a deity called Bhagavati Trailokyavijayā and it is apparently this goddess whose shrine was built. This sentence reads : fri-bhagavatyān Trailokyavijayāṁ Dāmappa satatar bhaktibhāvë tīshthati (i.e. tri-bhagavatyāṁ Trailokyavijayāyām Dāmappah satatam bhakti-bhāvēna tishthati).
The second sentence of the inscription is very much corrupt. It reads : nä[ma)-daranan pra[tyeksha) jit-anjalim=ashthanga sirasā yojyä pata[m] pranamāmi. It will be seen that, while the first sentence uses the name of the individual responsible for the construction of the shrine in the Third Person, the second is apparently represented as his speech in the First Person. Moreover the too many grammatical errors in the sentence make it very difficult to understand its real import. But we may possibly suggest that the main part of the sentence in correct Sanskrit should be näma-smaranāt pratyakshan krit-anjalin 8-asht-angan firasa yojyä patan pranamāmi. In that case, firasā yojya, 'one worthy of being placed on the head', together with namasmaranāt pratyaksha, 'one who becomes visible to a person as soon as the latter remembers her name', has to be regarded as an epithet of the goddess Trailokyavijaya. The sentence would then mean : "I bow down, with all my eight limbs and with folded palms, to the goddess who becomes visible to & person as soon as he remembers her name and who is worthy of being placed on the head, after having fallen flat on the ground."
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