Alampur inscription of Somesvara II, 1073

This Kannada inscription at Alampur belongs to the reign of the Western Chalukya king Bhuvanaikamalla Somesvara II.¹ P. B. Desai dated it to 24 April 1073.¹ It records a gift of land to the god Brahmesvara of Alampur by the Choda chief Chiddana.¹

The record

The inscription is numbered Alampur 22 in P. Sreenivasachar’s collection.¹ It begins with the usual invocation to the god Brahmesvara of Hatampura, the name by which these records call Alampur.¹ It refers itself to the reign of the Western Chalukya king Bhuvanaikamalla Somesvara II “from Bankapura”.¹ It is dated Saka 995 (Saka is an Indian way of counting years), Pramadi, on the full moon of Vaisakha, a Monday with a lunar eclipse.¹ P. B. Desai equated the date with 24 April 1073, noting that the weekday was really a Wednesday.¹

Chiddana and his gift

The record introduces the king’s feudatory, the mahamandalesvara (great feudal lord) Chiddana Choda-Maharaja, “of Karikala’s lineage”.¹ Chiddana was governing four districts: the Kanne three-hundred, the Pedakal eight-hundred, the Naravadi five-hundred and the Ayaje three-hundred.¹ The record registers his gift of land to the god Brahmesvara of Alampur.¹ Brahmarasi Bhattaraka, head (mahasthanadhipati) of the religious foundation, received the gift.¹ Its Kannada text, printed in the second part of the volume, runs to forty lines.²

The ink copy of 1956

In 1956 P. Sreenivasachar’s Corpus of Inscriptions in the Telingana Districts, Part III, reproduced an estampage (ink copy) captioned “Alampur inscription of Bhuvanaikamalla” as Plate 34, but did not print the text.³ Its forty lines and its opening agree with this record.² The only other record of Bhuvanaikamalla at Alampur in the 1961 collection, of 1076, has twenty-nine lines.²

Western Chalukya records at Alampur

Desai’s summaries include records at Alampur of Somesvara I (1051, 1057, 1060 and 1067), Somesvara II (1073 and 1076) and Vikramaditya VI (from 1078 to 1107).⁴⁵¹ Many of them are gifts to the god Brahmesvara, “adorning the western entrance of Sriparvata”, made through the head of his religious foundation.⁴⁵¹

Two records of Vikramaditya VI’s reign record gifts by the king’s chief queens.⁶⁷ One is by Abhinava-Sarasvati, whom Desai identified as Chandaladevi, in 1107.⁶⁷ The other is by Abhinava-Parvati Mannadavi in 1101.⁶⁷

A record of the Vijayanagara king Krishnaraya of 1521 calls the god Bala-Brahmesvara and describes him as manifested at Alampur.⁶ Desai took this to establish that Hatampura is Alampur.⁶ The earlier Chalukya records at Alampur are described on the page for the temples of Alampur.

Footnotes

1. Desai, Kannada Inscriptions of Andhra Pradesh (1961), p. 35, Nos. 91–94 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased except for the short phrase quoted. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴

2. P. Sreenivasachar, Kannada Inscriptions of Andhra Pradesh (1961), Part II, Kannada texts, pp. 117–118, Alampur 22 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)); compared by this site with the plate cited below. ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. P. Sreenivasachar (ed.), A Corpus of Inscriptions in the Telingana Districts of Andhra Pradesh, Part III (1956), Plate 34 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩

4. P. B. Desai, introduction to P. Sreenivasachar, Kannada Inscriptions of Andhra Pradesh (Andhra Pradesh Government Archaeological Series 3, 1961), p. 32, Nos. 80 and 83 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased except for the short phrase quoted. ↩ ↩²

5. Desai, Kannada Inscriptions of Andhra Pradesh (1961), p. 33, Nos. 83–87 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩²

6. Desai, Kannada Inscriptions of Andhra Pradesh (1961), p. 34, Nos. 87–89 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

7. Desai, Kannada Inscriptions of Andhra Pradesh (1961), p. 38, No. 108 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³