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EPIGRAPHIA INDICA
(VOL. XXXIV
IV.-Inscriptions at Sondhia The village of Sondhia in the Karchana Tahsil of the Allahabad District lies on the bank of the river Tons about 25 miles to the south of the city of Allahabad. This river, which rises from the Vindhyan range in the former Maihar State and joins the Ganges on its right bank in the Allahabad District, is the ancient Tamasă mentioned in the Puranic list of rivers as springing from the Rikshavat mountain,' a name sometimes applied in ancient Indian literature to that part of the Vindhyas which lies to the north of the Narmadā.
The following three pilgrims' records were found by me at Sondhia on boulders standing at a site about a furlong from the bank of the Tons.: A temple may have originally stood at the site which, as the inscriptions suggest, was a place of pilgrimage in olden days. But no trace of any structure is now found at the place. The inscriptions read as follows:
No. 1 Isvaracham(cha)ndraḥ
No. 2 Śri-Slokachaukshaḥ
No. 3
Siva[cham(cha)ndra]} These merely contain three personal names apparently of pilgrims who visited the place. The honorific word sri is prefixed only to one out of the three names. The palaeography of the records is interesting in that the characters belong to the South Indian alphabet of about the seventh century A.D. It seems that Isvarachandra, Slokachauksha and Sivachandra came from the south and visited the place on their way to the celebrated tirtha of Prayaga near Allahabad. Slokachauksha is a rather peculiar name.
As regards Nos. 1-2, interesting from the palaeographical point of view is the form of the letter & in both the epigraphs since it resembles the early Grantha form of the letter. The form of visarga in No. 1 is normal. But the same sign in No. 2 and the sign for anusvāra in No.1 are ornamental. The signs for the medial vowels i, 6 and au in No. 2 are ornamental and remind us of similar signs in the records written in the so-called shell-characters.
The letter é in No. 3 looks like early Telugu-Kannada in form. The palaeography of the three records thus appears to suggest that the pilgrims Isvarachandra and Slökachauksha hailed from the Tamil-speaking region and Sivachandra from the Telugu- or Kannada-speaking area.
V.-Inscription at Kasardēvi Kasardāvi is really the name of a deity enshrined in a modern temple on a hillock about 5 miles from the city of Almora. There is an inscription on a boulder below the site of the Kasardēvi
1 Soe Studies in the Goography of Ancient and Medieval India, p. 47 and note 7.
* Ibid., p. 49, note 3. Another river of the same name runs through the Fyzabad and Azamgarh Districts of U.P. and joins the Sarju (ancient Saraya) near Bhulia. The celebrated sage Valmiki is believed to have passed his early life on the banks of this river. Cf. N. L. Dey, Geographical Dictionary, 8. v. Tamasā.
My trip to the village was facilitated by the help rendered by Mr. K. B. Srivastav of the Allahabad University and his father Mr. B. N. Srivastav of Sondhia.
Among the records in South Indian characters found in the neighbourhood, mention may be made of the inscriptions of Väkātaka Prithivishēna's feudatory Vyāghra at Nachne-ki-talai and Ganj, which I was formerly inclined to assign to the middle of the fourth century A.D. See CII, Vol. III, Plate XXXIII, A-B; above, Vol. XVIT, Plato facing p. 12; also The Classical Age, p. 179 and note 1. But th in the Nachne-ki-talai inscriptions resembles the same letter in the Vākāțaks inscriptions (close of the fifth century) in the Ajanta and Ghatotkacha caves while its form in the Ganj inscription is the same as in the grants nf Narendra (beginning of the sixth century). Cf. above, Vol. XXXIII, p. 259 and note 3. This shown that the V&kataks king of those inscriptions is Prithivishēna II (beginning of the sixth century) and not Prithivisbepa I (middle of the fourth century).
