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No 13-INSCRIPTION FROM MANTHANI
(1 Plate)
D. C. SIRCAR, OOTACAMUND
(Received on 11.6.1959)
Sometime after I completed my study of the Gaya inscription1 mentioning king Prataparudra and his preceptor Mallikarjuna, Mr. K. H. V. Sarma, one of the Epigraphical Assistants in my office, drew my attention to a small Telugu work entitled Veyistambhālaguḍi Šāsanamu (1934) by Kambhampāti Appanna Sastri. This book (pp. 52 ff.) summarises the contents of an inscription on a stone pillar lying at Manthani, headquarters of a Taluk of the same name in the Karimnagar District, Andhra Pradesh. The record is stated to have been published by Tiruvaramgam Papayya Sastri in the Golakondapatrika (Telugu), Vol. VII, No. 67, pp. 1 ff. The journal was, however, not available to me. Since the Manthani epigraph apparently mentions Mallikarjuna known from the Gaya inscription, I visited Manthani and copied the inscription in October 1958. On a careful examination of the record, it was found that many of the statements about the contents of the epigraph in Appanna Sastri's book are wrong as they were apparently based on wrong readings and faulty interpretations of the text published by Papayya Sastri. The most serious of the numerous errors of omission and commission are the statements that the hero of the inscription, who set up the pillar and whose pious activities are recorded in the epigraph, is Mallikarjuna-suri, that he was the son of Krishna-nayaka, the ruling chief of Mantrakuta, and that Mallu-bhatta was the priest of the Kakatiya king Ganapati. It is of course unnecessary to deal with such mistakes in detail. I am thankful to Mr. Sarma for his help in the preparation of this paper.
The inscription is engraved on the four faces of a stone pillar now standing in a shed attached to the temple of Hanuman on the eastern bank of a big tank called Tammacheruvu. The writing is continued from the front side to the left, back and right sides. But the lower part of the pillar is broken away and lost. Consequently the writing on all the four sides are fragmentary. A few aksharas are also damaged or broken away at the beginning and end of many of the lines of writing. This fragmentary nature of the record renders the interpretation of some of its sections considerably difficult. It is also impossible to be sure about the exact number of lines broken away from the bottom of the inscription on the different faces of the pillar. But the facts that about 30 aksharas are certainly lost at the end of the second side and that they cannot be properly distributed in lines of 13 aksharas each as found in the lower lines of this face of the pillar would suggest that at least one more stanza is lost between the last verse on the second side and the first stanza on the third and that the number of lost lines of writing is more than 3 at least on the second face of the piliar.
There are some figures above the writing on each of the sides. Thus we have the representa. tion of the god Ganesa, of the sun and moon, of a bull and of a Siva-linga respectively in the upper part of the first (i.e. front), the second (i.e. left), the third (i.e. back) and the fourth (i.e. right) sides. The areas covered by the extant writing on the said four faces are between 12 and 13 inches in breadth and between 37 and 39 inches in height. Individual aksharas are generally a little above
1 Above, Vol. XXXIII, pp. 103 ff. Some suggestions about Mallikarjuna in that article may require modi. fication in the light of the present record. Cf., however, p. 68, note 1; p. 74, note 7.
Cf. M. Rama Rao, The Kakatiyas of Warangal, p 44.
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