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No. 13)
INSORIPTION FROM MANTHANI
Verse 1 is in praise of the glittering of the pearls in the hair of the mother of Gajamukha (i.e. the goddess Parvati, the mother of Gandia), while the next stanza (verse 2) is in adoration of the Kola, i.e. the boar incarnation of Vishnu.
The next three stanzas (verses 3-6) describe king Gapapati who was reigning at the city of Oruthgallu (i.e. Warangal) in the Andhra country. As clearly stated repeatedly in the prose portion of the record that follows, the king is identical with the Kakatiya monarch of that name, who ruled in the period 1199-1260 A.D. The inscription was engraved during the reign and in the dominions of Kakatiya Ganapati and, as we shall see below, the first of the transactions recorded in it took place in the first signal year of the said king and a later transaction is also specially associated with the same king's reign.
Verse 6, the latter part of which is broken away, introduces a scholar named Añchanarya. His relations with the persons mentioned in the stanzas on the second side of the pillar are not clear, because, as stated above, several lines of the original writing in the lower part of the first side are lost. But there is no doubt that the author of the prasasti introduces the hero of the eulogy with this stanza following the description of the reigning monarch. We know that there were two ways of introducing the hero of a prasasti. In some cases, the hero is described as a descendant of his ancestors so that the mention of his first ancestor immediately follows the reference to the reigning monarch, while in others the hero is first introduced after the ruling king and then again as the descendant of his ancestors. That Añchanárya was not an ancestor of the hero of the eulogy but the hero himself is, however, clear from the fact that he is stated in the verse to have played a prominent part in the quarters of the scholars proficient in the Sruti and Smriti, belonging to king Ganapati, and was therefore a contemporary of that king. As will be seen from our analysis of the writing on the third face of the pillar, the main objeot of the inscription was to record certain pious deeds of Mañchi-bhattopadhyāya alias Mañchanārya who was the priest of Kākatiya Ganapati. It appears that the same person has been called Añohanarya, Mañchi-bhattopadhāya and Mañchanåry&.
Second Side This section begins with a stansa (verse 1) in the Upendravajrā metre, the first five syllables of which are lost in the concluding part of the writing on the first side. The verse speaks of the installation of a deity described as 'accompanied by Ramā (i.e. the goddess Lakshml)' (Ramasahayam) and as charming on account of the three bends (in his three limbs while stending]' (madhuram tri-bhangya). There is no doubt that the reference is to the god Vishnu-Krishna. As will be seen below, verse 3 of this section seems to give the name of the deity as Krishna in & passage which has a twofold meaning. The word tri-bhangi used in this stanza is of lexical interest since it is not generally found in Sanskrit lexicons, even though it occurs in Līlāsuka Bilvamangala's Rrishnalilämpita or Krishnakarnāmsita. Brown's Telugu-English Dictionary rightly explains the word as the pose in which images like those of Vēņugõpāla, the flute-playing Gopāla (Krishna)', are made. He further says, "The word frequently occurs in books on sculpture and in some poems but is nowhere precisely defined." But the dictionaries of such languages as Hindi, Bengali, Oriya, Assamese, eto., generally recognise the word tri-bhanga, which is a variant of tri-bhangi,
1 Soo above, pp. 54-55 ; below, p. 99.
Canto II, verso 101. Some manuscripts use tri-bhanga in place of tri-bhangi. The stanza is quoted in Srtkumara's Silparatna, XIII, 28 (T. Ganapati Sastri's ed., p. 129). My attention to these works was drawn by Pandit V. S. Subrahmanyam. Lilāduka alias Bilvamangala flourished in the eleventh contury A.D. (Kteth, A History of Sanskrit Literature, p. 218).
