Valkhā chronology revisited: new plates and new questions

Abstract

This article contains editions of three new copperplate charters of the kings of Valkhā who, in the late fourth and early fifth centuries ce, ruled a territory situated to the north of the Vākāṭaka kingdom along the Narmadā river. Ramesh and Tewari, the editors of the famous Bagh hoard of plates discovered in 1982, furnished a straightforward chronology of five successive Valkhā rulers on the basis of 32 plates known to them. However, one of the plates edited here flatly contradicts the sequence they proposed. It turns out that the dating of several previously known Valkhā charters is also controversial. It has been suggested by other scholars that there were, in fact, two kings of Valkhā by the name of Rudradāsa as well as two by the name of Bhuluṇḍa. A reinvestigation of old data combined with the newly edited plates confirms the former and shows a high likelihood of the latter.

Introduction

A few years ago, three copperplate grants of the Valkhā rulers, which have not yet been published in an international forum, came to my attention. The first belongs to King Bhuluṇḍa, the earliest known ruler of Valkhā; the second to Svāmidāsa, the next ruler in succession; and the third to a certain King Rudradāsa. A monarch of this name ruled in Valkhā after Svāmidāsa in the years 68 to 70 (c. 387–89 ce), but the present plate bears the date 117, which calls for a re-evaluation of Valkhā chronology.¹

The territory of Valkhā was situated to the north of the Vākāṭaka kingdom on both sides of the Narmadā river, in the region traditionally known as Anūpa and/or southern Avanti. A famous copper vessel containing no fewer than 27 plates of its kings was recovered near modern-day Bagh (22°21′37″N 74°47′31″E) in 1982. These plates were edited by K.V. Ramesh and S.P. Tewari (1990), and their monograph includes an appendix that republishes the text of five previously known plates of the same rulers. Two further charters, also published before 1990, were for some reason omitted from Ramesh and Tewari’s appendix, though at least one of these was certainly known to the authors since they mention it in their introduction (1990: xi). The plates edited herein thus bring the total number of known Valkhā charters to 37 (or 38, if we include the vestiges of the deleted text on the new plate of Rudradāsa). In order to avoid lengthy and confusing titles, I use Siddham² IN numbers throughout this article to refer to these plates. Plates of the Bagh hoard (numbered I to XXVII in Ramesh and Tewari [1990]) correspond respectively to Siddham IN00501 to IN00527. The full concordance of Siddham IN numbers to published editions is shown in Appendix 1.

Every Valkhā plate bears a date, with the presently known corpus spanning the years 47 to 134. Their palaeographic features suggest the fourth or fifth century, but nowhere do the plates themselves specify the era in which these dates are reckoned. Well before the discovery of the hoard, R.C. Mazumdar (1919–1920) edited a charter of Bhuluṇḍa (IN00529) and one of Svāmidāsa (IN00530), opining on palaeographic grounds that they were dated in the Gupta era, whose epoch is c. 319 ce. V.V. Mirashi (1944), however, contended that they were to be understood in the Kalacuri era (epoch c. 249 ce), given that all of the charters acknowledge a paramabhaṭṭāraka above the Valkhā king, and that the territory of these rulers could not have been part of the Gupta dominion. Thus they must have been subordinates of the elusive Ābhīra kings and dated their charters in the Kalacuri era. As to the location of the Valkhā territory, he could only speculate at this point. Mazumdar’s two plates were obtained from Indore, but came from a collector’s legacy and their original provenance could not be ascertained. Mirashi was the first to link these to a third, previously known, plate (IN00533), issued by Rudradāsa and recovered from Sirpur (Shirpur, 21°20′49″N 74°52′55″E) in the Khandesh region of Maharashtra. Mirashi therefore opined that the actual homeland of the Valkhā rulers was Khandesh, a region where Ābhīra control was plausible.

D.C. Sircar (1946) countered this, pointing out that the title paramabhaṭṭāraka had a decidedly Gupta tone, while all known independent rulers near Khandesh at the time used the plain title mahārāja. If the Valkhā heartland was near Indore, then it may have been abandoned by the Śakas well before Candragupta II defeated them shortly after 388 ce; and if Mirashi is right about placing Valkhā in Khandesh, then the conclusion to draw is that this region must have been subject, at least nominally, to the Guptas. Mirashi was not convinced, initially simply reiterating his claims (1955: xxxv). Later, after four further plates of this group of kings (IN00528, IN00531, IN00532, IN00534) were recovered from the vicinity of Bagh, he acceded to locating Valkhā in that region (Mirashi 1980: 254; 1981b: 259), but emphasized his earlier argument (1980: 255–6) that Western Malwa was under Śaka control until Candragupta II’s campaign around 395 ce. One of these four – a plate of Bhuluṇḍa (IN00528) – refers to a donation made in the year 38, which would be equivalent to c. 357 ce if understood in the Gupta Era. Yet the lands of Valkhā cannot, says Mirashi, have been subject to the Guptas at that time. Mirashi’s reasoning has a slight glitch in it, since the plate in question reiterates a formerly made grant. It furnishes no proof that the era in which its actual date is reckoned was already in use in the year 38. The actual year of issue was read as 77 by Gai (1969) and Mirashi (1980; 1981b), whereas Shastri and Parikh (1978) read it as 47. The discovery of the hoard has substantiated the latter opinion beyond dispute, as affirmed by Ramesh and Tewari (1990), who republished the charter as Appendix 1 of their monograph. Thus, fortuitously, Mirashi’s fallacious argument still has some force: even the year 47 of the Gupta Era precedes Candragupta’s campaign against the Śakas.

Nevertheless, due to the lack of positive evidence for the use of the Kalacuri era, I concur with Ramesh and Tewari (1990: vii–viii) that Sircar’s position is more convincing than Mirashi’s. As Sircar suggested, the fact that Candragupta was yet to inflict final defeat on the Śakas does not exclude the possibility that the land of Valkhā, now securely located in the Anūpa region,³ was already affiliated to the Gupta empire in the third quarter of the fourth century. Ramesh and Tewari’s remark (1990: viii) that Bhuluṇḍa, whose name suggests a tribal origin, may have been one of the “forest kings” whom Samudragupta made subservient, according to the Allahabad inscription,⁴ is also worth bearing in mind.

Like all known Valkhā grants, the charters edited here are single plates inscribed on one side only. Their backs are blank and they bear no attached seals. The general palaeographic and orthographic features described by Ramesh and Tewari (1990: ix–xi) are applicable to each of the three plates presented here. I find that individual Valkhā plates vary in the way characters are drawn even while using the same essential forms, but I do not perceive any correlation between the style of execution and other variables such as the date or the ruler. A more intensive palaeographic study of the now respectably sized body of Valkhā charters may prove fruitful in future.

An interesting feature of the language of most Valkhā grants is the word valkhāḥ given as the place of issue at the start of the inscription; this is “normally the capital city of the issuing king or a military camp (jayaskandhāvāra), [and] is usually mentioned after the invocation, typically in the ablative case” (Salomon 1998: 115). According to Ramesh and Tewari (1990: xxiv), valkhāḥ in these plates is a plural nominative used in accordance with Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī (4.3.100),⁵ but if so, that still does not explain the role played by this word in the diplomatic composition of the charter, and their translation “from Valkhā” goes contrary to their explanation. It would also be plausible to interpret the word as a plural vocative, “Oh people of Valkhā!”. Mazumdar (1919–1920, 288) and Mirashi (1955: 7, 9) opine that valkhā or valkhāḥ stands for, or is to be emended to, the ablative valkhāt. Indeed, valkhā for valkhāt would be a normal masculine ablative in Middle Indic, in Pali or in Aiśa Sanskrit.⁶ It is, however, also possible that this form was used in the charters as a non-standard feminine ablative (for the standard valkhāyāḥ), even though such usage is not attested elsewhere. A quick survey of the preambles of all available Valkhā grants shows that the overwhelming majority of the grants use valkhāḥ with a clear visarga.⁷ The form valkhaḥ occurs once (IN00505) and is probably due to scribal error.⁸ Three plates (IN00517, IN00526 and IN00530) have valkhā,⁹ possibly resulting from irregular sandhi (the next word is parama-) or, again, from scribal error. Finally, a single plate (IN00522) was issued from a location other than Valkhā. This record gives pracakāsāyāḥ,¹⁰ most probably meaning “from Pracakāsā”, employing the standard Sanskrit feminine ablative. Intriguingly, the form valkhām, apparently used in the sense of a locative (standard valkhāyām), occurs in the main body of three grants (IN00505, IN00506 and IN00512). This suggests that the dropping of -yā- in the oblique cases of the feminine name Valkhā is a tendency rather than just an early mechanical mistake propagated formulaically in the opening address of Valkhā plates.

The identity of the toponyms mentioned in the grants edited here is uncertain. The first plate concerns the village Udūkhalapadraka, the expected modern name of which would be something like Okhligaon. There are several villages bearing names such as Okhala, Okhlikheda, Okhli Kheda, Okhari Kheda and Okhari Khedi in Madhya Pradesh, but apparently none south of the Narmada.¹¹ The second grant’s village of Bhaṭṭiyaka may be modern Bhatki (21°43′51″N 74°34′43″E), but there is no positive confirmation for this beyond the resemblance between the names. As for Yakṣadāsavaṭapadraka in the third grant, there are several villages named Badgaon or Bargaon in the vicinity of Bagh, but none is prefixed with anything resembling Yakṣadāsa.

The donees whose names are extant do not appear in any other known Valkhā record. Nanna, the dūtaka of the second plate (issued by Svāmidāsa in the year 65), is in all probability identical to Nannabhaṭṭi, the dūtaka of another charter (IN00530), issued by Svāmidāsa in 67. The dūtaka of the third plate, kumārāmātya Rudradāsa, calls to mind Bhaṭṭi Rudradāsa (dūtaka of IN00519, issued by Rudradāsa in 68) and/or Rudradāsa (dūtaka of IN00520, also issued by Rudradāsa in 68). I shall return to this matter in my discussion of chronology below.

Editorial conventions

I follow the DHARMA project’s transliteration convention (Balogh and Griffiths 2020), which is based on the ISO 15919 standard, but in addition uses uppercase vowels to transliterate initial (independent) vowel signs, and uppercase consonants to transliterate special final (halanta) forms of consonant characters.

Plate I (OB00535, IN00535): copperplate land grant of Bhuluṇḍa, year 52

This grant was issued by King Bhuluṇḍa, the first known ruler of Valkhā, in the year 52, that is, probably in 371–72 ce. The object is in storage at the National Museum in New Delhi (record number 89-239-22217, presumably indicating that it was acquired in 1989), and its text is edited here on the basis of the photo provided by the museum (Figure 1).¹² Given that the Museums of India website describes Plate I as associated with the “Later Guptas” and datable to the seventh century in North India, I assume that this item has not been studied by a specialist. The dimensions of the extant fragment of the plate are 13.8 × 7.5 centimetres. The only additional information furnished by the Museum is that the object originates from “North India”. About half of the copper plate, its left side, containing probably about 10 akṣaras per line,¹³ is broken off, but the remaining half is in good condition. The contents of the lost part, except for personal names, are relatively easy to reconstruct from the published grants of the kings of Valkhā. The plate contains six lines of writing engraved on one side only. The language is Sanskrit, and the inscription is written in prose.

Figure 1. OB00535, grant of Bhuluṇḍa, year 52. Photo © National Museum, New Delhi.

Transliterated text

Translation

^[1][From Valkhā,] Mahārāja Bhuluṇḍa, who is favoured²¹ by [the respectable paramabhaṭṭāraka], commands all [our principal agents: may it be known] ^[2]to you that we have granted [a plot of land] to this […]²² of the Bharadvāja gotra ^[3]on the southern banks of the river Narmadā, [on] the north-western [boundary of] the village of Udūkhalapadraka […] ^[4]as a Brahmanical gift (brahmadeya)²³ to be enjoyed by his son and his descendants as long as the moon, sun and the stars last. ^[5]Having been granted permission by us to enjoy it (bhogāya), he [shall be allowed by] our followers to profit from it and to cultivate it. ^[6]The executor (dūtaka) of this grant is the chamberlain (pratīhāra) […].²⁴ In the year 52 on the 12^th day of the bright half of the month Āṣāḍha.

Plate II (OB00536, IN00536): copperplate land grant of Svāmidāsa, year 65

This is a charter of King Svāmidāsa, the second Valkhā ruler, issued in the year 65 probably equivalent to 384–85 ce. The object is in storage at the National Museum in New Delhi (record number 92-53-29127, presumably indicating that it was acquired in 1992), and its text is edited here on the basis of the photo provided by that museum (Figure 2).²⁵ The website identifies the plate as one belonging to “Maharaja Sawai Dass (?) form [sic] Bagh region” and datable to the fifth or sixth centuries. The creative Anglicization of the name is clearly the clerk’s, along with the following typo, and the plate was evidently correctly identified by a competent but anonymous scholar as one of Svāmidāsa. The plate is 18.5 centimetres wide × 8.3 tall. No additional details have been made available by the Museum. A narrow strip, estimated to be about 4 centimetres wide and 3 millimetres tall, is broken off the top left corner without affecting the inscription. The text consists of eight lines engraved on a single side, the last of which is very short and aligned to the left margin. There is an additional line running bottom to top (with characters rotated 90° counterclockwise) in the left margin, representing the signature of the king. The inscription is in an excellent condition, except for the first few characters of the last three lines, which have been worn smooth. The text is Sanskrit prose.

Figure 2. OB00536, grant of Svāmidāsa, year 65. Photo © National Museum, New Delhi.

Transliterated text

Translation

^[1]Greetings! From Valkhā, Mahārāja Svāmidāsa, who is favoured by the respectable paramabhaṭṭāraka, ^[2]instructs all our agents: may it be known to you that we have granted to this ^[3–4]Brahmin Maghaśarma of the Bhāradvāja gotra an abandoned field in the custody of Pillaka, on the eastern boundary of the village Bhaṭṭiyaka on the southern banks of the Narmadā, ^[4-5]donated according to the convention applicable to a Brahmanical gift (brahmadeya) to be enjoyed by his son, grandson and descendants as long as the moon, sun and the stars last. ^[5-7]He shall be allowed by all our followers and their kinfolk, policemen, messengers, soldiers, heralds, guards and others to profit from it, to cultivate it or to have it cultivated [by others]. ^[7]The executor (dūtaka) is Nanna. In the year 65 ^[8]on the 11^th day of the bright half of the month Māgha.

Plate III (OB00537, IN00537 and IN00538): copperplate land grant of Rudradāsa, year 117

This land grant was issued by a king named Rudradāsa. The dimensions of the plate are approximately 21 × 9.5 centimetres. The item is kept in storage at the State Museum of Bhopal, where I was allowed to photograph it in February 2018 (Figure 3).³⁰ It must then have been a very recent acquisition, for according to Singh and Yadav (2020: 124) it was purchased by the Directorate of Archaeology for the Bhopal Museum in 2018–19. Singh and Yadav also mention an earlier and less accurate edition by T. S. Ravishankar (2019), to which I have not had access. Singh and Yadav, as well as Ravishankar as reported by them, read the date of the grant as 110, while in my opinion it is 117, that is, 436–37 ce by the Gupta Era. No provenance information is available. The plate, inscribed on one side only, contains seven lines, the last of which is very short and aligned to the right margin. This charter lacks a marginal signature, but the left margin is broad enough to accommodate one. The plate is a palimpsest, with clearly visible (but largely illegible) traces of an earlier inscription that was probably hammered flat before incising the present text, which was ignored by Singh and Yadav. The earlier text apparently consisted of eight lines and did include a marginal signature. The language of the inscription is Sanskrit. The text is written in prose.

Figure 3. OB00537, grant of Rudradāsa, year 117. Photo by author, courtesy of the State Museum, Bhopal. Scale in centimetres.

Transliterated final text

Notes to the edition

I differ from the edition of Singh and Yadav (2020, denoted below by SY) on the following points. Singh and Yadav in turn report points where they differ from Ravishankar’s edition (denoted below by R), but their notes do not always allow an accurate reconstruction of Ravishankar’s text. The latter is, in any case, inferior, so I show these only where pertinent to a disagreement between my edition and that of Singh and Yadav.

Line 1. yakṣadāsa-vaṭa-pa° * SY: yakṣadāsa-caṭa-pa°

Line 2. astu vas (su)vidita[ṁ] * SY: astu ca ssavidita … ya (the last character in the line in fact belongs to the deleted text; see below)

Line 3. °puṇyā° * SY: °punyā°

Line 4. pragrāhya * SY: putrāpya (R: pragrāpya)

Line 5. atisr̥ṣṭa(m) * SY: atisr̥ṣṭa; divasād ārabhyaiṣa * SY: divasā dīrabhyaiṣa; brāhmaṇa * SY: brāhmanā (R: brāhmaṇa); kr̥ṣa° * SY: kuṣa°

Line 6. °(n) saṣupabhuñjaś * SY: °tsaṣupabhūñjaś; kenacit * SY: kena bhit; 100 10 7 * SY (also R): 100 10

Transliterated vestiges of deleted text

Translation of final text

^[1-2]From Valkhā. Mahārāja Rudradāsa, who is favoured by the respectable Paramabhaṭṭāraka, in sound health commands all our attendant agents who are gathered in the village of Yakṣadāsavaṭa: may it be well-known to you that ^[3-5]in order to increase my own merits I have granted to this Vājasaneyin Brahmin Guhila of the Kāśyapa gotra the plot of land in the custody of Ci(tpi?)ṭa as rent-free property (agrāhāra), being a Brahmanical gift (brahmadeya) exempt from all dues, to be enjoyed by his sons and grandsons. ^[5-6]Hence, from now onwards, no one shall object in any way to the Brāhmaṇa Guhila cultivating [it] and enjoying [it] as his own land. ^[6]The executor (dūtaka) of this grant is kumārāmātya ³⁷ Rudradāsa. In the year 117, ^[7]on the 5th day of the bright half of the month Māgha.

Rudradāsa redux

Although none of the charters reveals any genealogical connection between the Valkhā rulers, the Bagh hoard allowed Ramesh and Tewari (1990: viii) to furnish a straightforward chronology as follows:

However, Plate III above (IN00537), issued by Rudradāsa in the year 117, flatly contradicts this simple sequence, and the erased text on Plate III (IN000538) also features the name of Rudradāsa and seems to mention the year 109. The question arises: is it at all possible that the date of IN00537 is not 117? The date of the deleted IN000538 is, after all, barely legible and may well be incorrect. The address formula at the beginning of IN00537 is strong circumstantial evidence for assigning it to the late period of Valkhā, since it describes the king as kuśalī and puts the verb of instruction after the specification of the officials addressed.³⁸ The date, recorded (as usual) only in numerals but not in words, consists of three figures (see Appendix 1). The last of these is damaged, but the part of it that can be made out is confidently identifiable as 7.³⁹ The second figure is 10. Although the sign for 10 in this period normally resembles a lowercase letter alpha (α), the present specimen is not drawn as a single loop, but rather as two separate strokes, resembling the combination cC with the first stroke almost closed into a circle. Nonetheless, the numeral we have here is doubtless a 10: this glyph is executed in exactly the same way in several other Valkhā records, presumably being an adaptation to copper as a medium.⁴⁰ The first of the three numerals is ambiguous: outside its context it could arguably be a figure 50, and it differs in some details from the standard forms of both the figure 100 and the figure 50 in Gupta-period inscriptions. I shall return to this issue shortly, but for the present, the fact that it is followed by a figure 10 clinches the assertion that it must represent a number in the hundreds’ order of magnitude. To the best of my knowledge, the additive use of two numeral symbols representing tens (such as 50 followed by 10 to represent 60) is unheard of anywhere in Brāhmī-derived scripts. Therefore, since any multiple of 100 is out of the question, the date of the present plate must be read as 117, even if this upsets our established view of Valkhā chronology.

It turns out, however, that the “established view” is precarious to begin with: there are several previously published plates of these rulers which, according to their original editors, contradict Ramesh and Tewari’s dating of the rulers. The first known Valkhā charter was the Sirpur plate of Rudradāsa (IN00533), dated in the year 118 according to its initial editor Bhagwanlal Indraji (1887). Mirashi (1944: 64 n. 9; 1955: 10–12) revised the reading of this date to 117 (which I endorse), while Ramesh and Tewari (1990: xi) reinterpreted it as 67, averring that the date of this record is “badly damaged except the symbol for 7” and that “the symbol that is damaged could be considered as that for 60”. That is to say, they evidently do not suggest reading a pair of symbols interpreted additively as 50 plus 10; instead, they want to see a single damaged symbol here and read it as 60. However, the actual numerals inscribed on the plate (see Appendix 1) are incontrovertibly three separate signs, so even if their identification as 100+10+7 were contestable (though I do not find it so), they must represent a number in the hundreds. Coincidentally (or not), Ramesh and Tewari omit the Sirpur plate from their appendix where they present previously published Valkhā plates.⁴¹

All in all, assigning the Sirpur charter to the year 67 is not warranted by any consideration other than that it fits Ramesh and Tewari’s pigeonhole, albeit with difficulty. Ramesh and Tewari (1990: xi) argue that the last record of Svāmidāsa is dated 66, so Rudradāsa’s reign could plausibly have commenced in 67. However, the last known record of Svāmidāsa is in fact of the year 67. This is a plate from Indore (IN00530), first edited by R.C. Mazumdar (1919–1920) and included in Ramesh and Tewari’s appendix, but ignored by them in their discussion of chronology. We thus allegedly have both Svāmidāsa and Rudradāsa reigning in the year 67, and Svāmidāsa’s Indore plate is dated in the month of Jyaiṣṭha (April–May) in that year, whereas Rudradāsa’s Sirpur plate was issued in the month of Caitra (February–March).

Things become slightly complicated at this point, since there are two further plates of Rudradāsa (IN00531 and IN00532) from the ostensible year 67 and the month of Caitra, found together and published before the hoard (Mirashi 1981a; Usha Jain 1981), and republished in Ramesh and Tewari’s appendix. The evidence available prior to the discovery of the hoard had therefore, understandably, led some scholars (Bajpai 1980: 95; Usha Jain 1981: 267) to hypothesize that Svāmidāsa was Rudradāsa’s successor who ascended the throne between Caitra and Jyaiṣṭha in the year 67. The Bagh hoard, however, has demonstrated without the slightest doubt that Svāmidāsa preceded Rudradāsa. The facts as presented by Ramesh and Tewari thus lead to the unwanted and extremely unlikely corollary that the month of Caitra followed rather than preceded Jyaiṣṭha – in other words, that the calendrical year employed by the rulers of Valkhā commenced in Vaiśākha or Jyaiṣṭha. However, a re-examination of these two other plates of Rudradāsa shows that their year is in fact 69, not 67 (see Appendix 1). We are thus back to square one: it is only the Sirpur plate that clashes with the known facts about the reigns of Svāmidāsa and Rudradāsa – and that only if we accept Ramesh and Tewari’s overruling of the unanimous opinion of all previous scholars that the Sirpur plate’s date begins with the numerals 100 and 10. With the added evidence of the Bhopal plate, in which the glyphs for 100, 10 and 7 are clearer and of largely the same shape, it becomes certain that the Sirpur record is dated 117.

We thus know of two charters of Rudradāsa from the year 117, a strong indication of the existence of a second ruler of this name. One significant detail in Ramesh and Tewari’s chronology still seems to disaffirm this. One of the plates of the hoard (IN00524) was, according to the editors, issued by Bhaṭṭāraka in the year 102. Bhaṭṭāraka’s other known charters hail from the years 127 and 129,⁴² so unless we stipulate two rulers of this name (which is unwarranted), the logical conclusion should be that he reigned throughout the span of time from 102 to 129, ruling out a date of 117 for Rudradāsa. However, even a superficial glance at the date of IN00524 shows that the second numeral is definitely not 2. The correct reading is probably 30: see Appendix 1 and compare the dates 38 in IN00528 and 134 in IN00527. A date of 130 for Bhaṭṭāraka actually fits the expected chronology better than 102, which is remarkably far from his other attested date(s). All in all, there is thus no evidence to speak against the possibility that a Rudradāsa sat the throne of Valkhā in 117. Another detail that may have a bearing on the issue is that all of the Valkhā charters dated up to the year 107 use the word varṣe to indicate the year, while all from the year 127 onwards use either the word savva (for saṁvat) or the abbreviation saṁ (see Appendix 2). In the intervening decades, the deleted IN00538 on the Bhopal plate, apparently from the year 109, uses savva; the final text IN00537 on the same plate, from the year 117, has saṁ, but the Sirpur plate (IN00533) of the same year employs varṣe.

It may be argued that records with saṁ and savva are dated in a different era than those using varṣe. Given the palaeographic age bracket for the plates, a straightforward scenario would be to assign the (lower) varṣe dates to the Gupta Era (epoch c. 319 ce) and the (higher) saṁ/savva dates to the Kalacuri Era (epoch c. 249 ce). But far from merging two Rudradāsas into one, this in fact produces three kings of this name,⁴³ and moreover it puts the charters of Bhaṭṭāraka amid the reign of Bhuluṇḍa. Postulating an inverse correspondence of date terms to eras would separate Bhaṭṭāraka and Rudradāsa II from the earlier rulers, including Rudradāsa I, by well over a century. Such a gap is unlikely in view of the fact that plates with saṁ and savva dates were included in the hoard comprised mostly of plates with a varṣe date. It thus appears that the adoption of saṁ or savva reflects a shift in chancery practice, but not in the era employed by the clerks.⁴⁴ Given the (tentatively read) attestation of savva from the year 109 and the attestation of both saṁ and varṣe from the year 117, the shift appears to have been gradual, with both forms used in parallel (perhaps by different clerks) for some time.

A final point of possible relevance is that the dūtaka of the Bhopal plate of Rudradāsa II was kumārāmātya Rudradāsa, and a Rudradāsa was likewise the dūtaka for two charters of King Rudradāsa I issued in the year 68, namely IN00519 where he has the prefix bhaṭṭi, and IN00520 where he has no title. One might argue that these three charters must have involved the same Rudradāsa in the function of dūtaka, and consequently they must have been issued within a small span of years. However, Rudradāsa would have been a fairly common name in the period, and in my view the odds that both Rudradāsa I and II had functionaries named Rudradāsa do not require a stretch of probability, especially given that the latter official apparently served in a different capacity than the former, who may have been his grandfather or an unrelated person of the same name.⁴⁵

All things considered, the inevitable conclusion is that a second Rudradāsa did, pace Ramesh and Tewari, reign around the year 117, and probably in the year 109 too. Once this is accepted, there may be some merit in revisiting the old suggestion that there was also a Bhuluṇḍa II among the kings of Valkhā.

The pesky fifties

The date of an Indore plate of Bhuluṇḍa (IN00529) was read as 107 by both Mazumdar (1919–1920, 290–1) and Mirashi (1955: 8–10). Ramesh and Tewari (1990: x–xi) acknowledge this, but argue that “a close comparison and scrutiny of the symbols for 57” in the hoard plates leads to the conclusion that the Indore plate is also dated 57, thereby disproving the existence of a Bhuluṇḍa II. As a matter of fact, symbols that Ramesh and Tewari interpret as 50 in the hoard fall into two rather different types, as illustrated by hand-drawn abstractions in Table 1 below. A rounded form that may be called the “Typical 50” is a smooth kidney shape resembling a modern figure 3, with the right-hand side showing a smooth bulge rather than a notch; the lower prong may be larger and/or curlier than the upper one. This type is clearly represented in IN00503, IN00505, IN00508 and IN00510 as well as in the hitherto unpublished plate at the National Museum (IN00535). A distinct form that I shall provisionally call the “angular sign” vaguely resembles a handwritten capital J: its upper prong is not a convex curve but a straight or slightly sinuous horizontal stroke with a dip at the left, meeting the vertical right-hand stroke at a cusped right or slightly acute angle. Clear specimens of this form are found in IN00511 and in the problematic Indore plate (IN00529). The figures in IN00504, IN00506, IN00509, IN00512 and IN00513 are unclear, but each is more likely to represent the typical form rather than the angular one. In addition, there are a few glyphs that do not readily sort into either of these types. The sign in IN00502 has a very short upper prong and a longer bottom prong that curls back strongly, a slightly acute angle at the bottom right and a somewhat softened right angle at the top right. The one in IN00507 has a long and sinuous upper prong, again with a cusp at the bottom right and a soft right angle at the top right.

Table 1. Hand-drawn representations of glyphs representing 50 and 100 in Valkhā plates

There is a further plate of Bhuluṇḍa, published before the hoard but ignored by Ramesh and Tewari (IN00534), in which two editors (Mirashi 1981a: 228–30; Balchandra Jain 1981) independently read the date as 107. The first numeral symbol in this date bears some resemblance to the atypical sign read as 50 by Ramesh and Tewari in plate 2 of the hoard (IN00502) as well as to the angular sign that Mazumdar and Mirashi interpret as 100 in the Indore plate (IN00529).

There is no straightforward way to decide whether the problematic Bhuluṇḍa plates are dated in the 50s or the 100s. The undisputed 100 signs in the plates of Bhaṭṭāraka from the hoard all vaguely resemble a Devanagari ta with a headline that dips at the left and may be straight (IN00524 and IN00525) or sinuous (IN00526). The glyphs for 100 are unclear in the Sirpur plate of Rudradāsa (IN00533) and the plate of Nāgabhaṭa (IN00527), yet both of these seem to match the standard Gupta-period form of 100 better than the peculiar form found in Bhaṭṭāraka’s plates. Rudradāsa’s figure 100 in the Bhopal plate (IN00537) is distinct and resembles the “angular sign” except in sporting a loop (rather than just a hook) at the bottom left; it is also reminiscent of the 100 in Bhaṭṭāraka’s plates which are, however, open at the bottom. This loop in the Bhopal figure was clearly not engraved as a single continuous stroke; instead, part of it is a curved extension of the vertical at the right, while another is a bent stroke connecting the end of that curve back to the stem.

There is thus a continuum of forms of (putative) 100 and another of forms of (putative) 50, and the two sets overlap to some extent. The only criterion that distinguishes all instances of uncontested 100 in the Valkhā corpus from all instances that Ramesh and Tewari read as 50 is that the lower limb is merely a curved or hooked extension of the right-hand vertical in the latter, whereas in the former it is a separate stroke connected to the middle of the right-hand vertical and disjoined from it at the bottom. There are, however, no specimens of such a digit 100 anywhere else in the body of Indic epigraphy as far as I know: as a rule, the usual figure 100 may have a straight or hooked stem, but if a hook is present, it is hardly ever developed into a closed loop, much less into a separate stroke connected to the middle of the stem but not to its bottom.⁴⁶

It must nonetheless be accepted that the form with a left limb attached to the centre of the vertical and separated by a gap from the bottom of the vertical (i.e. the one resembling a Devanagari ta) was a legitimate figure 100 in Valkhā, since it is followed by a figure 20 or 30 in Bhaṭṭāraka’s charters. However, as implied above, I conceive of this form as gradually evolved from the standard Gupta 100 by first closing the hook into a loop, then by executing the loop as two separate strokes with a small gap at the bottom (this stage being represented by Rudradāsa’s 100 in the Bhopal plate), and finally by developing the second stroke into a left limb attached only to the centre of the vertical. If this was indeed the case, then the shape of the lower left section of the glyph is not necessarily the only, nor even the best, indicator of whether we are dealing with a figure 50 or a 100. Rather, the distinction should be sought in the upper limb: in the case of 50 this is generally rounded (though possibly quite straight or even notched in the middle in atypical forms), and always curves down gently to continue in the stem on the right; whereas in 100, it is generally sinuous or notched (though it may be straight), and always meets the right-hand vertical at a right or acute angle. In other words, the “angular sign”, which fulfils this condition but has an open hook at the bottom left, may in fact represent the number 100, being an early stage in the morphing of the standard figure 100 into the form seen in Bhaṭṭāraka’s plates.

Glyphs for “50” resembling my atypical forms A and B occur in some inscriptions from Gujarat, such as the Māliyā charter of Dharasena II of Valabhī, c. 571 ce (CII3, 164–71), and a charter of a mahāsāmanta Viṣṇuṣeṇa probably datable to 592 ce (Sircar 1953–1954;54). Both of these have a prominently notched upper prong, but this is paired with a very soft angle at the top right, which differs conspicuously from my “angular sign”.

A casual survey of the palaeography of Valkhā plates has not been of much avail in adjudging whether the non-standard “50” signs merit reinterpretation as 100. While the Valkhā copperplate corpus encompasses a variety of character shapes and ducti, this variation seems to be independent of the date and probably reflects the individual styles of the engravers or the scribes who drew the text on the plates for an artisan to incise. Indeed, the execution of particular characters (such as ma) often varies nearly as much from instance to instance within a single plate as across the corpus. A rigorous and systematic analysis of numerous specific details may uncover a consistent change or evolution that is a function of time, but I have not been able to discern such a phenomenon.⁴⁷

Nor is there any apparent linear development as a function of time in the style of the script as a whole. In Appendix 2 I have labelled the ductus of a script “boxy” if its character bodies tend to fit into and largely fill regular squares, and are composed of strokes that tend to be straight and to meet at right angles, which may be slightly soft. This style approaches the general aspect of box-headed or Deccan scripts such as that used in most Vākāṭaka plates. Another variety apparent in many of the Valkhā records is here termed “wavy” because its strokes are predominantly sinuous or notched, giving rise to some soft acute angles at corners. The wavy style generally resembles southern scripts such as that of the Kadambas and Pallavas, and may reflect a form of writing adapted to palm leaves. Finally, the ductus I call “bendy” appears to be a cursivization of the wavy style (perhaps specifically an adaptation to copper as the writing medium?) and is characterized by boldly simplified, slightly curving or straightened strokes and soft acute angles at corners. This style is very close in appearance to the records of the Maitrakas of Valabhi. The boxy style is found only in the earlier charters, last clearly represented in the year 54 (IN00505 and IN00506), with less clear-cut examples from the years 65 and 69 (IN00536 and IN00532), the ductus of which is cursively simplified and may thus be termed bendy, except that it has predominantly straight lines and right angles. The wavy and bendy styles make their appearance throughout the corpus, but the bendy ductus tends to predominate as time goes on, and is used in eight of the ten records that can (in some cases tentatively) be assigned to the 100s.

Although my classification of scripts into these styles is somewhat subjective and arbitrary, it is noteworthy that the variation in the shape of the numeral that Ramesh and Tewari interpret as 50 is independent of overall ductus: at least two distinct forms of the alleged 50 sign occur in each script type (see Table 1 above for charters with specimens of such signs grouped by ductus; Siddham numbers in parentheses indicate records in which the sign is unclear due to damage and is thus not securely assigned to the category where it is listed). The purely angular sign does not occur in the boxy script, but is found in both the wavy and the bendy style. Since both these scripts also offer several specimens of the rounded “typical 50”, it stands to reason that the angular sign is not a stylistic variation of the sign for 50 but a distinct glyph; and if so, then its value can hardly be anything other than 100.

The case for Bhuluṇḍa II

Given the above indications, there may well have been a second Bhuluṇḍa in the early 100s of the Valkhā reckoning, since Rudradāsa I flourished in the years 68 to 70, and Rudradāsa II in 117. Even if the attestations of these kings come from early in the reign of the former and late in that of the latter, the intervening period is more than long enough to accommodate another ruler;⁴⁸ and, as shown above, the plate of Bhaṭṭāraka dated 102 by Ramesh and Tewari (IN00524) was in fact issued in 130. It is thus possible that at least some of Bhuluṇḍa’s records hitherto understood to be dated in the 50s should be re-evaluated as dated in the 100s and issued by Bhuluṇḍa II. These include:

1. (a) probably the two plates that use the “angular sign” in their date (IN00511 and IN00529);

2. (b) possibly some or all of the plates with atypical signs (IN00502, IN00507 and IN00534); and

3. (c) possibly one of the plates with a damaged sign (IN00512).

The unclear numeral in this last record (c), followed by the digit 7, seems to sport a small beak at the top right, which might mark it as an “angular 100”. However, this document concerns a donation to the temple deity Bappa Piśācadeva, to whom Bhuluṇḍa (I) made two donations in the year 54 (recorded with unambiguous rounded symbols) and one in the year 59 (recorded with an unclear but unquestionably rounded symbol). The charter IN00512 is therefore in all probability dated 57 and belongs to Bhuluṇḍa I. I find that the upper limb of its first numeral sign is slightly convex rather than straight or notched, and therefore surmise the beak to be a blemish in the plate or the rubbing, and classify the sign as an unclear “rounded 50” comparable to that used in one of the plates of the year 56 (IN00510).⁴⁹

Conversely, I deem the two records with a clear “angular sign” (a) to be dated in the 100s with fair certainty. My principal reason for this is palaeographic: the glyph employed in these has a definite beak that one would not expect in a sign for 50, and moreover, as noted above, it fits into a continuum of forms through which the regular sign for 100 may have morphed into that found in Bhaṭṭāraka’s records. I have found no features in the text of either of these grants that would either corroborate or gainsay this hypothesis with any force. The formula ācandrārka-tārakā-kālīna in IN00529 is more common in the earlier Valkhā records (whereas many of the later grants expand it with graha-nakṣatra),⁵⁰ but it does occur in the Sirpur plate (IN00533) which I confidently assign to the year 117 and to Rudradāsa II, so the simpler formula is not necessarily an indicator of earliness. The beneficiary of IN00511 is the community of Brahmins residing in the capital city.⁵¹ Donations to such an entity are absent from the charters definitely attributable to Bhuluṇḍa I, but they occur several times (with varying turns of phrase) from the year 63 to the year 129, so this feature is not really helpful in dating the charter.⁵² Thus, in my opinion IN00511 and IN00529 both belong to the year 109.⁵³

The question of the three plates with atypical numerals (b) remains fraught with uncertainty. The atypical-A figure found in IN00502 is the least similar to glyphs I interpret as 100, lacking both an acute angle at the top right and a closed loop at the bottom, and sporting a short upper limb. Its beneficiary is a group of goddesses (navataṭāka-mātaraḥ), for which there are no exact parallels in the body of Valkhā charters. However, nearly all grants made by Bhuluṇḍa I concern deities, including one (IN00510) given to a goddess temple (mātr̥-sthāna-devakula), whereas all grants of the later rulers were made for the benefit of natural persons or groups thereof. This is therefore a strong indication that IN00502 was also issued by Bhuluṇḍa I, not Bhuluṇḍa II. The charter employs the simple compound ācandrārkka-tārakā-kālīna to express the perpetuity of the donation which, as noted above, is ubiquitous in the early charters of Valkhā, though not exclusive to them. The address formula at the beginning of the document includes a long rollcall of officials (ārakṣikāmātya-kr̥tyakara-bhojaka-bhaṭa-cchatrādīn āyuktakān), which has an exact parallel in IN00528, a grant made by Bhuluṇḍa I in the year 47, but which is absent from all other (early and late) grants, each of which simply mentions āyuktakas without any of the specifics (with some variation at the very end of the range, from the year 129 onwards).⁵⁴ Finally, this plate is written in the boxy style that is more common in the earlier records.

The other two atypical numerals also lack an acute angle at the top right corner, but the atypical-B sign in IN00507 has a notched or sharply sinuous horizontal upper stroke, which is not seen in any of the definite 50-s in the Valkhā material,⁵⁵ while atypical-C in IN00534 has a closed loop at its lower end. In the text of IN00507, the short phrase ācandrārka-tārakā-kālīna may be an indication of earliness (see above), whereas the fact that the beneficiary is a natural person may be a counterindication of Bhuluṇḍa I.⁵⁶ The opening formula includes the phrase bhuluṇḍājñāpayati, which is only paralleled in an early record, namely IN00535 edited above (see also the footnote to that locus). All other Valkhā plates employ the prefixed verb samājñāpayati or, in some of the latest records, use bodhayati. I assume that the use of bhuluṇḍājñāpayati is an idiosyncratic variation (or error) in these two plates rather than an indicator of their connectedness, since IN00507 exhibits two other unique turns of phrase. To wit, it uses the phrase asmat-pradhānāyuktakān in the address formula where practically every Valkhā charter⁵⁷ has asmat-santakān āyuktakān, and it mentions āyuktakas again in the injunction that officials must respect the ownership of the donee.⁵⁸ Finally, the charter refers to the heritability of the estate with the phrase putra-pautrānvaya-bhojya, which otherwise first occurs in the year 63 (IN00514) and is quite common from that time onwards, whereas most of the earlier records either omit this qualification or use plain anvaya-bhojya (or, once, putrānvaya-bhojya in IN00535, the newly edited plate of the year 52).

As for IN00534 – the Manawar plate which Mirashi (1981a) and Balchandra Jain (1981) date to the year 107 (and which Ramesh and Tewari ignore) – the atypical-C numeral symbol in its date has a fairly sharp right angle (though definitely not an acute one), and a closed loop at the bottom, which does not occur in any of the symbols that may be interpreted as 50. It is also very easy to see this symbol as a cursive simplification of the one used in IN00537, the Bhopal plate of Rudradāsa II. The text of the charter offers no clues as to its date, though the fact that its description of the perpetuity of the donated estate includes the words graha-nakṣatra may indicate that it post-dates Bhuluṇḍa I.

All things considered, IN00502 is probably an early grant belonging to Bhuluṇḍa I, and Ramesh and Tewari were correct to interpret the atypical sign A as 50. I am inclined to believe that atypical signs B and C represent the number 100: in the case of the former chiefly on the basis of the contents of IN00507, and in the case of the latter primarily on the basis of the shape of the numeral symbol.

Conclusions

This article started out as a simple edition of some hitherto unpublished copperplate charters. The work, however, called for a reinvestigation of Valkhā chronology, which in turn brought to light several cognate charters that have been published before, but were disregarded by Ramesh and Tewari (1990) in their monograph on the Bagh hoard, and hence neglected by subsequent scholars treating on the subject such as Ghosh (2015). By my survey of known Valkhā inscriptions I hope to provide a fuller picture of this body of texts as a starting point for future research. To this end Appendices 2 and 3 present some details distilled from across the corpus. I have also found that the dates of several previously published charters are in need of revision. Some of the alterations I suggest are minor, such as reading the last digit as 9 instead of 7 in a few plates (see Appendix 1 for specifics), but occasionally more substantial revision is warranted. Thus, Bhaṭṭāraka’s charter IN00524 is definitely not dated 102, as read by Ramesh and Tewari; the correct date is in all probability 130.

The dates of some plates found independently of the hoard have already been the subject of dispute. The newly edited Bhopal plate of Rudradāsa (IN00537) establishes beyond doubt the existence of a second ruler of this name, who flourished around, and probably also before, the year 117 of the Valkhā reckoning. The date of the Sirpur plate (IN00533), previously contested, can now be confidently read likewise as 117. My analysis of the numeral signs potentially denoting 50 and 100 in Valkhā plates has shown that some of Bhuluṇḍa’s plates may also belong to a second ruler of that name. There is a total of four known records that I believe were issued by this king rather than his earlier namesake, though the evidence for this is much weaker than that for Rudradāsa II. I therefore propose the following revised chronology of Valkhā rulers (for a complete list of the records assigned to each of these kings, see Appendix 2):

There is a conspicuous gap in Valkhā plates between the years 70 and 104, corresponding roughly to 390–424 ce. It is tempting to speculate, though there is no positive evidence for this, that Candragupta II (r. c. 376–415 ce) exercised direct control over the region of Anūpa, and that the Valkhā rulers reasserted their authority (though remaining nominally dependent sāmantas under a presumably Gupta paramabhaṭṭāraka) during the reign of Kumāragupta. The apparent recurrence of the non-Sanskritic name of the founding father Bhuluṇḍa at this time may be a symbolic expression of such a reassertion.