Jedcherla inscription of Udayana Choda

What it is

This short Telugu inscription is on a stone slab set up in front of the Venkatesvara temple at Jedcherla, in the Mahbubnagar district of Telangana. It is Mn. 12 in Part III of P. Sreenivasachar’s Corpus of Inscriptions in the Telingana Districts (1956), which reproduces it on Plate 29.¹

Contents

The donors were two customs officers, Kibbatte Melpatta Dandanayaka Nalla Siddhamayya and Erasiddhamayya. They served the mahamandalesvara (great provincial lord) Kanduri Udayana Choda-maharaja of the Choda dynasty and the Kasyapa gotra (clan).¹ They granted to the god Svayambhu-Somanatha, for two lamps and offerings, five coins called Gokarna-Singa rukas every month from the shop dues of Kodur. Later customs officers were asked to keep paying them without fail.¹ The editor thought the record probably came from Kodur, the town of the chiefs’ title.¹

Date

The inscription dates itself in the Chalukya-Vikrama year 1084, Chitrabhanu, on the second day of the dark half of Pausha, a Tuesday, at the winter solstice. The editor took the era to be a mistake for Saka and gave the date as Tuesday, 25 December 1162.¹

Significance

The record shows the chief whom P. V. Parabrahma Sastry called Udaya Choda II still in office in 1162. Parabrahma Sastry dated Udaya Choda’s records from 1136 to 1176, and held that the Kakatiya Rudradeva left him his fief after annexing Kandurunadu.² See Udaya Choda II and the Kandur Chodas. The coins it names, the Gokarna-Singa rukas, carry the name Gokarna, which was borne by several chiefs of the family.¹²

Footnotes

1. P. Sreenivasachar (ed.), A Corpus of Inscriptions in the Telingana Districts of Andhra Pradesh, Part III (1956), pp. 43–44, Mn. 12 (archive.org↗ (opens in a new tab)). Paraphrased. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. P. V. Parabrahma Sastry, The Kakatiyas of Warangal (1978), pp. 67–69. ↩ ↩²