Gadval plates of Vikramaditya I

The Gadval plates are a grant of Vikramaditya I of Badami. They were issued in the far south during his wars with the Pallavas, but kept at Gadwal in the Telangana country.¹² They are the main record of his claim to have overthrown three Pallava kings and taken Kanchi.¹²

Discovery

The plates belonged to a schoolboy at Kurnool.¹ He said that they had been in his house at Gadval in Hyderabad territory, and that “some old woman was saying that they were found in the fields”.¹ C. V. Doraswami Aiyar, a clerk in the Settlement Office at Kurnool, brought them to the notice of the Archaeological Department.¹ They were obtained on loan through the Collector.¹ E. Hultzsch edited them in Epigraphia Indica X from ink impressions supplied by V. Venkayya.¹

Venkayya described three copper plates with slightly raised rims, nine inches long, the first and last written on the inner side only.¹ They are strung on an oval copper ring.¹ Its ends are fixed in a mass of copper bearing an almost round seal, about an inch across, with “the rude figure of a boar in a running posture”.¹ A slit in the last plate suggested that someone had tried to take it off the ring without cutting the ring.¹ The plates, ring and seal together weigh 160 tolas.¹

Language

Hultzsch found the writing in excellent condition, in an alphabet like that of other grants of the same period and dynasty.² The language is Sanskrit, in prose and verse.² Two expressions, khanduga vadla and salage, were in his words “taken over from the Telugu vernacular of the donee”.² Of the private names, three are Prakrit and three Dravidian.²

Vikramaditya and the Pallavas

After the usual family line, the grant adds four verses already known from the king’s Hyderabad plates.² They give his surnames Anivarita (“the unopposed”), Srivallabha, Ranarasika (“fond of fighting”) and Rajamalla.² They say that he defeated Narasimha, Mahendra and Isvara.² Hultzsch identified these as the successive Pallava kings Narasimhavarman I, Mahendravarman II and Paramesvaravarman I.²

A further verse names Isvara-Potaraja of Kanchi, and the conquest of Kanchi is mentioned too.² Following F. Kielhorn, Hultzsch read the claim to have destroyed the Mahamalla family as another reference to the Pallavas.² (See Paramesvaravarman I.)

Date and camp

The grant was made on the full-moon day of Vaisakha in the 20th year of the reign, after 596 Saka years had passed.² J. F. Fleet gave the equivalent as Tuesday, 25 April 674.² The king’s army had then entered the Chola province and was camped at Uragapura on the south bank of the Kaveri.²

Venkayya proposed that Uragapura was the old Chola capital Uraiyur near Tiruchirappalli (then Trichinopoly).²³ Hultzsch thought it more likely a poetic form of Nagapattanam (Negapatam).²³ Robert Sewell used the grant to place Vikramaditya south of the Kaveri on that day, after his capture of Kanchi.⁴

The grant

The grant was made at the request of Ganga-Mahadevi, who Hultzsch thought “seems to have been one of the queens” of the king.³ Three Brahmanas each received fifty nivartanas (land measures) of land in a village named [Chedu]lli.³ The last verse praises Vikramaditya as the destroyer of the Pallava line.³

The Epigraphia Telanganica (2023) prints the Gadval plates. Under the heading “Velnalli (Gadwal Plates)”, it gives a summary taken from Inscriptions of Andhra Pradesh, Mahabubnagar District (2003). That summary describes a pillar inscription in the Arka Brahma temple at Alampur. The inscription records a gift made at the request of Gangamahadevi to men with similar names. It gives the land as 25 nivartanas and the date as 15 April 675. Whether this is a separate record or a confused description of the plates is not clear from the summary.⁵⁶

Footnotes

1. E. Hultzsch, “Gadval Plates of Vikramaditya I; A.D. 674”, Epigraphia Indica X (1910), p. 100 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹²

2. Hultzsch, “Gadval Plates” (1910), p. 101 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷

3. Hultzsch, “Gadval Plates” (1910), p. 102 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

4. Robert Sewell, The Historical Inscriptions of Southern India (1932), p. 26 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩

5. Gajjala Vasanta Lakshmi (ed.), Epigraphia Telanganica I: Pre-Kakatiya Telangana (2023), p. 37. Cite-only; paraphrased. ↩

6. Epigraphia Telanganica I (2023), p. 38. Cite-only; paraphrased. ↩