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100
Satyavrat
ved of his alleged humble moorings by lowly bards, who, in Dr. Pandey' view, were instrumental in elevating him to the honoured status. It i simply beyond reason and comprehension how a court panegy1is a small fry in all essentials, could have the arrogance to include in a official epigraph an expression, which was patently insulting to hi sovereign, who, in his own estimation, was a paragon of manifol virtues, prowess, modesty and liberality included. 5
The difficulty in the correct interpretation of the verse stems fror the corrupt readings which beset Fleet's text and which Dr. Pandey, i his wisdom, has chosen to turn a blind eye to 'Historical implication apart, the oddities in Fleet's reading of the line, cannot escape perceptive reader. In our opinion, the last word of the quarter, whic Fleet had read as aryatām, holds bey to the correct restoration of th text. As a result of his close scrutiny of the original stone and it estampages, over the years, Prof. Jagannath Agiawal is convinced tha there is no trace of an anusvara over 1t. The woid therefore is the nominative aryata, and not the accusative singular, as Fleet took it to be. Once aryață is, as it should be, accepted the correct reading, the verb prapayati and the noun vandakajano in Fleet's text lose their relevanc and cease to have locus stand in the verse. From the minute details h has laboriously furnished of the shape and matra of each syllable o the third word, there is little doubt that what Fleet had falteringly reas as vandakajano, is actually vṛttakathane. Assured of these two crucia words, one cannot be insensible to the absurdity of prapayatı, in the situation. Pra is obviously an error for hre, the verb thus being hrepayati and not prapayatı, as Fleet had made it out. With these correction: carried out, the text of the line would read as follows. a: fafte ganuà à quarzda, "Whom his innate nobility causes to blush in the course of recital of his exploaits by means of songs and praises." The obvious connotation is that despite a plethora of varied achievement! to his credit, Skandagupta was so modest that he would go ablush or hearing them sung by his court-baids. The aversion of a cultured and great person to hyperbolic eulogis, howsoever true they may be, is so well-known. This is as it should be. However, fired with a zeal to stick to his guns, Dr. Pandey has confronted the suggested text with the objection that vṛttakathane is in poor company with gitaih stutibhiśca and aryata hrepayatı 18 bad Sanskrit. Morever, the causative hrepayati, he confides, is not found used in the sense 'causes to blush' in the extant Sanskrit literature. This is rather a reckless statement. One need not go far but turn to V. S. Apt's 'A Student's Sanskrit-English Dictionary',
