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MAY, 1897.]
MISCELLANEOUS TRAVANCORE INSCRIPTIONS.
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MISCELLANEOUS TRAVANCORE INSCRIPTIONS.
BY THE LATE RAO BAHADUR P. SUNDARAM PILLAI, M.A., M.R.A.S., F.R.H.S.
Introduction.
WORK implies waste. No mason, however careful, can turn to account every stone quarried
cost, and given to build with. in
and others are found not to suit. So it is with all arts and industries-literary and scientific labours not excepted. Perhaps, more of the poet's plots break in the course of construction than pots under the potter's wheel; and who can number the laboriously spun-out inductive generalizations that have snapped under the strain of exceptional phenomena ? But what is lost for one end is seldom found good for none. The absolutely good-for-nothing is as rare in this imperfect world as the infinitely good-for-all. The chips that fall off from the chisels of the cabinet-maker are just the things for tops and toys to be made out of. Broken-down inductions and imperfect generalizations that the theorizer must perforce reject constitute "the wise saws and modern instances" of the practically shrewd.
Let me hope that the principle will apply to the materials I have gathered, and am still engaged in gathering, with a view to help the future historian of Travancore. From the nature of the case, only a small proportion of the inscriptions in any province of India will be found pregnant with political history. Lucky is the epigraphist who finds even one in a hundred turning oat really such. Most of our lithic records are like that fixed proportion of postal covers, which year after year turn up with the "awfully" affectionate address "To my own dear uncle!" None the less unavoidable is the labour spent in discovering, copying, deciphering, and. interpreting these evidently indefinite and ill-conceived stone documents. Though rejected as unfit by the makers of dynastic tables, may they not prove good as pegs to hang our ethnic speculations upon, or as sticks to lean on in the quagmires of philological conjectares? At any rate, containing, as they do, solid and substantial facts, they ought to be able to serve us at least as torches in our weary wanderings in the dreary limitless past, exposing and exorcising the endless illusory legends, traditions, and such like ignes fatui, which alone now seem to people even the ages but one step removed from the present. But utilitarian considerations apart, it seems to me a pious duty which we owe to our forefathers, to collect and preserve what memorials they have so lovingly left behind. To reject as trash such of them as have come to our notice, on the ground of their not answering any particular requirement of ours, would be adding insult to injury. It would seem as if we heard their last parting words and yet heeded them not!
I propose, therefore, in the following pages to record those inscriptions of Travancore which have come within my notice, but which I did not see my way to utilize in the course of my papers on the "Early Sovereigns of Travancore (ante, Vol. XXIV.)." In doing so, I shall first take up those which give distinct dates in a definite era; next, those giving regnal years of the then sovereigns, some of whose dates have now been ascertained, while others yet remain to be found out; and lastly, those whose age seems doomed for ever to remain a matter of mere conjecture. To all of them, I shall try to add notes and comments as I go on rendering them into English.
The three definite eras, made use of in Travancore records, are the Kollam, the Saka, and the Kali, and the origin of all of them seems to be equally enveloped in impenetrable mystery. It is quite natural that, to the limited intellect of man, the origin of many things should be shrouded in eternal darkness, such as the origin of the Universe, or the origin of evil, which is perhaps just the same question on its moral side; but that the origin of so artificial an institution, of so simple a convention, as the institution of an era, an era to reckon time with,
1 A part of the incantations resorted to for frightening the Malabar devils is the waving of small torches called keltiri, made by twisting waste cloth round tiny chips of certain kinds of hard timber.
