Indian Antiquary Vol 48

Author(s): Richard Carnac Temple, Devadatta Ramkrishna Bhandarkar
Publisher: Swati Publications

Page 29

MARCH, 1919]
INSCRIPTIONS ON TWO PATNA STATUES
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INSCRIPTIONS ON TWO PATNA STATUES IN THE INDIAN MUSEUM.
BY RAMAPRASAD CHANDA, B.A.; SIMLA. VISITORS to the Bharhut Gallery of the Indian Museum are familiar with the two big Patna
Statues presented to the Asiatic Society of Bengal so long ago as 1820. These statues have been described by Cunningham in his Report, Vol. XV, pp. 1-3. Both these statues are in the round and are made of grey sandstone which has been highly polished like all edict-bearing pillars and statues of the time of Asoka." About the position and date of the inscriptions Cunningham writes, " A broad scarf crosses the left shoulder to the right hip, hanging down in a loop in front of the breasts, and in a long train behind. The folds of the scarf are marked by deep parallel lines, between which, at the back of each figure, there is a short inscription. At first I thought that the statues might be of the age of Asoka ; but the forms of the letters show that they must be of a later date, somewhere about the beginning of the Christian era." Some of the letters of these inscriptions are doubtful owing to the deeply cut parallel folds of the scarves on which they are engraved." Cunningham thus reads the records -
A. Yakhe Sanatananda.
B. Yakhe Achusanigika. Recently these short epigraphs have been made the subject of special study by Mr. Jayagwal, who, on the strength of these records, propuses to recognise in these statues the portraits of two Saišunâka kings, Udayin and Nandi Vardhana, in an article entitled Statues of two Saibunáka Emperors (483-409 B.C.) in the Journal of the Bihar and Orissa Research Society, Vol. V, pp. 98-106. Mr. Jayas wal starts with the assumption that the insoriptions are contemporaneous with the statues. He writes :
After a long scrutiny I came to the conclusion that the letters had been carved before 'the parallel lines to denote the folds on the scarf were chiselled. I consulted Mr. Arun Sen; Lecturer in Indian Art to the University of Calcutta, on the point, and he confirmed my view. The fold-lines have continued in spite of the letters. Over the letters they have been delicately handled; while the symmetry of the lines have been kept on, the forms of the letters have not been interfered with, the original strokes of the letters being scrupulously avoided and kept separate." (pp. 90-91.)
The last statement is not correct as the plate will show even in accordance with Mr. Jayaswal's own reading of the records. In A (his b) the base line of the triangular ower parts of kha and va has not been kept separate and in B (his a) the base line of n of ni and the letter that he recognises as Saiśunâka dh has been interfered with. The more reasonable view seems to be that the scarves with the folds marked by lines were modelled first and the letters were engraved by a different hand sometime after the statues had been finished. The method followed by Mr. Jayaswal in deciphering the short inscriptions is thus explained by him
« The letters, however, which Cunningham had declared to be later than Aboka, presented to me a wonderful problem. They did not fully tally with characters of any period yet known to Indian Epigraphy. While one letter, n, at first appeared to belong to a later age, all others disclosed forms more archaic than the oldest known Brahmi characters. The archaism was so marked that four letters, afterwards identified as th, dh, 6 and s appeared to be new forms. To them value could be assigned only on presuming them to be ancestors of such Abokan letters to which the latter oan be carried back on principles of epigraphic evolution." (p 90.)