Bodhan inscription of Somesvara I

The record

The inscription is at Bodhan in the Nizamabad district, and is Nb. 2 in P. Sreenivasachar’s collection.¹ It refers itself to the reign of the Western Chalukya king Trailokyamalla Somesvara I.¹ It is dated Saka 978 (Saka is an Indian way of counting years), the cyclic year Durmukhi, on the thirteenth day of the bright half of Jyeshtha, a Thursday.¹ P. B. Desai equated the date with 29 May 1056, noting that the weekday was in fact a Wednesday.¹ The record had already been published in the Hyderabad Archaeological Series, No. 7.¹

The record states that the king’s officer, the pergade Jogapayya, renovated the temple of Indranarayana.¹ According to the record, the Rashtrakuta king Indravallabha had built the temple in the capital Bodana, and it had fallen into ruin over time.¹

Jogapayya installed an image of Vishnu and set up a pillar of Garuda in the temple.¹ He made gifts of house sites, oil mills and a flower garden for its services.¹ The record praises the officer for the buildings with which he adorned the town.¹

Bodhan as a “capital”

Desai cautioned that the description of Bodana as a capital (rajadhani) did not necessarily mean that it had once been a capital of the Rashtrakuta empire.¹ As other records in the collection show, the word meant the chief town of a region.¹ See the Rashtrakutas and the Western Chalukyas of Kalyani.

Footnotes

1. P. B. Desai, introduction to P. Sreenivasachar, Kannada Inscriptions of Andhra Pradesh (Andhra Pradesh Government Archaeological Series 3, 1961), p. 20, No. 54 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²