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MISCELLANEOUS
No. 33;
PLATE XXVII
SPURIOUS MANKANI PLATES OF TARALASVAMIN : (KALACHURI) YEAR 346
OF the two copper-plates which, as shown below, purport to record a grant of
Taralasvāmin, one was discovered as far back as 1864 somewhere in the Sańkhēdā
Tālukā in the Baroda District and has been edited with a lithograph, by Mr. H.H.
Dhruva in the Epigraphia Indica, Vol. II, pp. 19 f. This plate contained only the concluding
portion of the grant, including the benedictive and imprecatory verses, the name of the
writer and the date. The other plate, which was recently found in the possession of Patel
Mathurabhai of Māńkaņī, a village in the Sańkhēdā Tālukā has been edited with a facsimile
by Mr. A. S. Gadre in the Important Inscriptions from the Baroda State, Vol. I, pp. 4 f. This
plate contains the earlier portion of the grant, viz., the genealogy of the donor, the name of
the donee and the object granted. The text of the latter plate ends exactly where that of
the former begins.1 Their characters also completely agree. There is, therefore, no doubt
that the two plates make one complete grant. The plate edited by Mr. Dhruva, the exact
provenance of which has not been recorded, may therefore have come from Māńkaņī itself.
That this grant is probably spurious was shown by me in an article published in the
Journal of the Ganganath Jha Research Institute, Vol. II, pp. 389 f. I edit the record here
from excellent ink impressions of both the plates, which I owe to the kindness of Mr.
A.S. Gadre.
The plates measures 8" in breadth and 3.4" in height. The first weighs 17¼ and the
second 16 ¾ tolas. The writing on both is in a state of good preservation. The plates
contain two holes, .2" in diameter, at the top, for the rings which must have originally held
them together, but no ring or seal has been discovered. The record consists of twenty
lines, of which ten are inscribed on the inner side of each plate. The average size of the
letters is .15".
The characters belong to the western variety of the southern alphabets, and resemble
those of the grants of the Gurjaras and Early Kalachuris. The only peculiarities worth
noticing here are that the initial i consists of two curves, one below the other, in iv=oddhuta-
1.3, while it has its usual form in inv, 1.7; the length of medial i is indicated by a dot in
a circle or by a double curve, see –vichi-, 1.3; the curve of the subscript t is added to the
right of its vertical in bhukta, 1.15; the subscript form of th shows a notch in –sthiti-, 1.II;
v is almost rectangular in –vaisvadeva-, 1.I0 and the subscript m is cursive in nirmmalya,
ll. 18-19. Punctuation is marked by a short horizontal stroke in l.20 and by double
vertical stroke in ll. 15-20.
The language is Sanskrit, and except for four benedictive and imprecatory verses,
the record is in prose throughout. The orthography shows the usual peculiarities
of the doubling of a consonant after r as in –kīrttih, 1.4, the substitution of the guttural
nasal for anusvāra in –vanśair=, 1.I3 and –chatvārińśōttarakē, l.20, and the use of ri for ŗi
in krishatah, l.I2.
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1 The record on the first plate ends with pañcha-mahā-yajña-kriy-ōtsarppaņ-ārttham, while that on the
second plate begins with ā-chandr-ārk-ārņņava-kshiti-sthiti-samakālīnam.
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